So not the most interesting pictures here at the
Asociación de Reciclaje de Bariloche (Bariloche Recycling Association) but if you look closely with a recycling geek's eye... you'll notice that these bales are incredibly clean. By clean I mean free of contaminates. Only materials that are suppose to be in those bales are in those bales.
Only green and blue PET are suppose to be in the front bales and only clear PET is suppose to be in the back bales. If you look closely (which I did) that is all you will see.
I have never seen such clean bales before in the United States. Sure our tonnages may be much higher, but the quality of US bales ready for market are not this clean. Why? The folks here at The Bariloche Recycling Association sort everything by hand (much like Bogota). There is no conveyor belt moving items past them at high speed, there is no machine blowing air at different colored plastic launching them into the correct bin, there is no magnet pulling up steal, there is no electric charge flinging away the aluminium, and there are no gears or wheels carrying away cardboard.
Tonnages here may be incomparable to a MRF (Materials Recovery Facility) in the states, but I'd bet the buyers of these commodities are pretty pleased with the material they are receiving. Part of the reason more and more paper mills are going out of business on the west coast is that bales of fiber they buy from the recycler carry too many contaminates. Those contaminates damage their equipment and make using a recycling feed stock unprofitable. The less buyers of recycled material in the US means a heavier reliance on markets overseas.
Remember, recycling won't happen if no one will buy what you are trying to recycle.
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