Organics & De-Packing
Organics comprise 40% of the commercial and residential waste stream; more than any other component by far. It is difficult to get at and deal with responsibly, but well worth the effort when you do. What could be more important to the environment than using food to grow more food?
In order to develop an organics processing system that actually works we needed to ignore what everyone else was doing and design it from the ground up. First, we realized that plastics were, for the foreseeable future, not going away and that they were an integral part of the food processing and packaging industries. We decided to embrace plastics, not shun them. For you, that means a much cleaner and easier way to collect, separate, and store your organics while awaiting pickup.
Next, we needed to reduce the number of containers we placed at your site. Our Resource Recovery Parks were key to that as well. They allow you to deposit your separately bagged organics in the same bin with other bagged, commingled recyclable materials. One truck picks them up and when we get the material to one of our facilities we separate them into their component parts. That’s made easier by you keeping the food and other compostable material away from everything else.
From there, your organics travel to our composting facilities to be turned into high quality soil supplements to aid in agricultural production in the areas where they are needed.
We have also perfected a way to separate organic matter from its packaging at high volumes. Whether it’s a truckload of expired yogurt, cucumbers in plastic sleeves, out of specification canned salmon, or even old soft drinks and juices, we can recover 99.9% of the organics from their packaging. That is material that was otherwise destined for landfills.