Bogota central recycling facility

Here is the Materials Recovery Facility (where they sort and bale incoming co-mingled recycling for market) I mentioned in the last post. 

"What an odd scale" I thought to myself before I realized that it was for the tow wheeled donkey carts, not the large trucks like we have in the US. Most scales I have seen in the states are all large enough to fit an 18 wheeler. 

 Every commodity category is sorted here; by hand. Green PET from clear , Tetra pak, paper, shredded paper, rigid plastic, film clear, film mixed, aluminum, steal, etc…

 In many cities in the states there is no market for Tetra Paks, by no means do they fetch a good price here in Bogota, but at least they are recycling them.

  They even separate  out the clear PET that contained cooking oil. I believe it has a lower value than the normal PET (or at least keeps the normal PET price higher with it out of the mix), and there is so much food that is fried in cooking oil here, it may warrant its own stream.

 I loved this! I have never seen a bale bound together with twine in the States. All balers I have seen before use a metal cable. The baler in this facility puts this operations miles ahead of the rest of the recycling centers in Bogota, but it has its differences than the States.

Bales of Tetra Paks and more ready for market. 

Bogota recycling depot, the power of hand sorting.

This is Margdaula (or at least that is how I wrote her name down). She runs a recycling center in Bogota. This center happens to be right next to the largest and maybe only MRF (Materials Recovery Facility) in Bogota. The MRF next door is run by contractors under the Mayor’s office. Margdaula can pay a higher price for a lot of items than other recycling centers I visited as she is so close to one of the big buyer/sellers (the MRF next door).

She does some clever things here to maximize her profits. The most interesting being stripping all the PET she buys of caps and wraps. She tells me that this almost DOUBLES the price she can get for selling PET clear and Green.
How amazing is that? In the states we would never think to have a person physically do that task.
In Portland for example, the bottle bill collected PET is stripped of its caps and wraps at OR-PET in St. Helens and the non-PET is turned into its own mix of flake. I believe it is then sent to Denton Plastics in Gresham for the final stages of recycling and sold to buyers from there. In Portland we have somewhat of a solution for the caps and wraps, but in many cities around the world the caps and wraps devalue the PET stream.
I would say that is another great example of the power of the human hand in recycling.
In the west coast we believe we have a lot to show the world about recycling, but sometimes I´d argue the opposite. 

Bogota depot

Here is a Mom and Pop recycling transfer station. As in this location buys materials by the Kilo from street recyclers and the the materials in larger amounts to the next buyer on the food chain, or directly to end market. 

Cardboard, PET, Film Plastic, Newspaper, Office Paper, Mixed Rigid Plastics. All these items have a price: meaning all these items are picked up off the street or out of garbage bags left for the garbage truck.

Bogota, Colombia. After hearing a lot about the industry in Bogota, I  had to make a detour there. 

 This was probably my favorite sight of the day; a bike picking up recycling. Garbage/Recycling trucks are incredibly fuel innefficent, averaging around 3-5 miles per desiel gallon. They create smog pollution and noise pollution, and they are horrible for the steets costing municipalites more money then they probably realize.

 Here is one of the hundreds of donkey carts used to collect recycling by independent street workers all over the city. They collect, sort, and bring their recycling to mom and pop buyers all over the city. People are hauling these carts around because last year the Mayor banned horses. I heard he gave some trucks to the bigger companies, but I see many people lugging these around, not so many trucks....at least there is less smog?

 Here is a street recycler I kept in touch with while in Bogota. His turf was the neighborhood where I was staying. He said he was making $0.036 a pound off of PET, still not a lot, but much better than any price I found in Peru. There must be healthier recycling markets here in Bogota. He collects glass, aluminim, plastic and cardboard.

 And again, the best of the best....REUSE.- Here my hostel collects empty glass soda and beer bottles and the items are picked up by a guy on a motor bike and taken back to the bottler. BETTER THAN RECYCLING

 Basura CERO, a Program launched by the Mayor last year. By no means is Bogota Zero Waste. A qualification meaning you achive a 90% waste diversion rate in the US. I believe Bogota is around 20%. You have to start somewhere.

Here, a recycler with a Basura Cero loggo on his cart (maybe he is somehow associated with the City´s program?) follows the garbage truck on its route collecting recycling before it goes into the trash truck and is lost forever. I saw many folks following the truck routes collecting recycling.

Plastic ball bit

Here in Ollantaytambo, a stop along Peru Rail before Machu Pichu, the municipal street workers collect and store the PET bottles here while cleaning the streets.

 I asked some locals where this ball pit of plastic ends up and was told Cusco or Lima. There are many recycling transferstations around Cusco, but I believe the final market (where the plastics bottle manufature is) is in Lima.

 Below is a recycling transfer station in a town called Puycara. From what I understood with my rough spanish is that they buy PET at $0.006 a lb. Not much but, and this is a huge but, they are buying it. There is no way I could walk into a Far West Recycling depot in Portland with PET slung over my back and actually get money for it. I am sure many other cities in the US also do not have recyclers buying PET off scrappers.
So the price is low, but they are buying it from individuals (most have a truck or motor bike to haul bottles in). The fact that there is value to the PET gives folks the insentive to collect it and bring it here. It has nothing to do with the environment, it is purly an economical force driving recycling in the Sacred Valley.

 A giant mountain of PET. The lady under the yellow tarp is sorting the green from the clear.

Beware of gaurd dogs. This was the first time I regretted not getting a rabies shot before my trip.

Machu Pichu

 Yes, welcome to the District of Machupicchu. Where we store our recyclables in lovely green tyveck bags all year round for the tourests to see.

 Another great storage unit filled with bags of recycling. Tons and tons of water bottles are sold in this town to the tourists climbing Machupichu and hanging around in Aguas Calientes. I did not see any toursits with their own refillable water bottle. Not many have the proper water filters or the means to boil their water....or perhaps they are lazy. The folks adminitrating Machu Pichu have lovely recycling recepticals dotting the land, how wonderfull that they will take the guilt off the consumer of the bottles. You would think more folks would notice these caches as EVERYONE passes them.

This last one also has a good amount of metel next to it. These locations are all along the road that the buses take up to Machu Pichu, and there is also one by the train tracks.
My guess is that the cost of labor to put these items on the train and get them out of Machupichu Town (Aguas Calientes) is far greater than the revenue they would receive in return for the plastic, metal, etc...
There happens to be a recycling facility I visted in a town on the rail line about 1.30hrs away, but stopping there might be inconvienent. Or perhaps no one has thought of doing it? It does not seem to be a top priority here in Machupichu town.

Cusco's efforts

You can see that here in Cusco, municipal workers bag plastic bottles on the back of their truck as they are collecting trash from the street. I asked many times where they we taking the bottles but many workers gave me vague answers. I think they saw me as an interrogator.
There are some recycling transfer stations, if you can call them that, on the outskirts of the city. I believe the final product (Sorted PET in supersacks) is bound for Lima. 

What gets recycled in the deepest canyon in the world?

So that Burro is going to haul those bottles up and out of the 2nd deepest Canyon in the world. Why? Well because those bottles have a value. That value happens to be 1 Sole per 1 liter glass bottle. Very similar to the redemption value in some of the states in the US...Oregon included. However as in Oregon and other states, the redemption material is recycled, here in Peru, it is Reused. Reuse a much more efficient method of turning something that was old new again. The resources these Peruvian brewing companies invest in transporting and cleaning old bottles is more economically and environmentally friendly when comparing it to recycling glass into new glass (or worse, aggregate). Always remember the hierarchy.... REDUCE (stop drinking so much?) Reuse and THEN Recycle. 

I included this to show the wishful thinking of the villages in the canyon or the municipality on the rim, Cobanaconde.  Perhaps these are put everywhere to please us gringos. Gringos love recycling, or the at least the warm fuzzies they get when they think something is getting recycled. Or, one is just happy they don`t have to carry their bottle to the top, clean conscience included.  It appears as though most bottles collected end up burned or just tossed into the river. Why? I´d suggest because there is no value connected to the plastic bottles. (also some hikers are lazy and won’t carry their own garbage out of the canyon) Unfortunately, to get some communities to recycle, there has to be a reason larger than the recycling-warm-and-fuzzy-feeling. When you are making less than $10 a day, your priorities are elsewhere. 

Lima recycling receptacle

I believe this is an organization out of Santiago, Chile. Notice some sponsors of this receptacle....Cocacola, the company behind probably 80% of  Peru´s plastic bottles...

Under Vidrio (glass) you see Owens Illinois, a global glass recycler and manufacture. They happen to have a large recycling plant in my home town of Portland, Oregon.

Also notice Tetra Pak: lots of liquids are sold in Tetra Paks in Lima and other parts of Peru for the lack of personal refrigeration. As to where these collected Tetra Paks are going, I am not sure. Such hybrid materials are difficult to recycle, but I suppose if one has enough of them, Tetra Pak may see the benefit of trying to recycle them here in Peru.

That uncertainty about the destination includes the other items shown as well. As Lima is a port and costal city, I´d guess many collected and recycled materials go to markets abroad. 
Lima does have some plstic fabrication though, I do know there is a plastics blower (makes plastic bottles), so perhaps there is some PET recycling that actually happens here in Lima.

Paper.... again not sure. I´ve seen some cardboard bales driving around but I am unsure of the final destination.

When in doubt, I guess China.

Packaging on air plains

My post will desplay the horrific use of plastic on my flight from Atlanta, Georgia to Lima, Peru. Here you see my boxed breakfast. The packaging includes a variety of materials:

1.     A paperboard box

2.     A plastic and foil container for my peanut butter and one for my jelly

3.     A plastic knife

4.     A plastic bag for my bread (not film)

5.     A #6 plastic cup (on left) for my orange juice. 

6.     A Styrofoam cup (on right) for my hot tea. 

Note that my plastic cup on the left and my Styrofoam cup on the right are actually made of the same resin code: #6 aka Polystyrene. I use the word Styrofoam, a Dow Chemical trademark, as it is what polystyrene materials are commonly called and recognized as.  http://building.dow.com/media/trademark.htm

This picture shows a high usage of packaging and a variety of different plastics. Plastic recycling does not consist of one giant category where all types of plastics can go mixed together and magically turn in to new bottles. It is extremely difficult recycle combined resin codes and even sometimes the same resin codes together to make a difficult to create a marketable product.

The picture demonstrates how it would be next to impossible to set up a system to have these plastics recycled after flight. Also note that all these plastics are what most would describe as junk plastics; not highly valuable on any commodity market. The solution here is not to figure out how to recycle these plastics; it is to figure out how to not have so much packaging.

Also, when I asked the flight attendant if she could pour my tea directly into my old cup, she refused and mentioned something about Ebola.