With America Recycles Day approaching on Nov. 15, a recycling plant in West Jordan has stepped up to the challenge of increasing conservation and cutting down on time costs.  Waste Management’s Utah recycling facility has been renovated recently with state-of-the-art equipment in order to process more recyclable materials in even less time.

The entire procedure is manned by only 50 employees and produces up to 100 tons of processed recyclable materials a day. After being separated and bound into bales of organized material, eight to 10 trailers transport the materials all over the state to be reused.

Melissa Kolwaite, the manager of communications for the West Jordan plant, said due to the improvements, operations of the facility are faster and more efficient.

“We process more than any other plant in the state,” Kolwaite said.  “And within 60 days, this material can be a brand new product.”

Because Waste Management is a single-stream recycling plant, it receives all kinds of recyclable materials together and must then separate them by type before they can be shipped to other locations.  This is where the plant’s renovations have been particularly useful.

Among the plant’s new improvements is an optical eye that reads the density of paper, the facility’s most commonly received material, and then separates newsprint from other types of paper such as soda bottle labels or notebook paper.

Another recently acquired piece of equipment is the eddy, a type of magnetic conveyer belt that pulls aluminum and tin products from the rest of the materials. Another repelling magnet then separates the aluminum from tin.

According to Kolwaite, aluminum is one of the most efficient materials Waste Management recycles.

“Recycling just one can of soda saves the amount of energy that it would take to watch television for three hours,” Kolwaite said.  “That’s pretty efficient, and that’s just one can.”
Kolwaite said Utahns, especially young people, should be particularly committed to recycling because it is the future of natural resources.

“When you look at Utah, there is just so much natural beauty we want to preserve,” Kolwaite said. “Recycling is the way to do that. The impact of natural resources is huge, and recycling is the future.”

BYU Recycling recycles most materials and allows all faculty and staff to order a recycling bin for their office. In Provo, the city offers curbside pickup as well as drop-off recycling.
Waste Management currently processes eight million tons of recyclable materials a year, but has a company goal to increase that number to 20 million by the year 2020.