What happens after pickup? Tracking Broward County’s recycling journey – WSVN 7News | Miami News, Weather, Sports
Have you ever wondered what happens to the items you place in a recycle bin? 7Investigates did and put South Florida recycling to the test. Here’s Heather Walker.
Week after week, we place our boxes and bottles, cans and plastic in our recycle bins. We hope that it will help save the planet.
Angela Munez: “I hope it is, I pray that it is. That’s why I do it every two weeks. I take it out, it’s always filled to the top.”
But 7Investigates wanted to find out what really happens to the items we recycle.
We glued Apple AirTags to bottles, cans, plastic, milk cartons, and boxes to see where they would end up.
We started in Broward County with a cardboard box in Dania Beach and a wine bottle in Hollywood. A paper cup at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and a cardboard tube in Pompano Beach.
All of the items were tossed into recycling bins with an AirTag attached.
Heather Walker: “Do you think your recycling gets recycled?”
Susan Akhtarkhavari: “Honestly, I’m doing my part and I’m hoping it does.”
Here’s what happened. The cardboard tube first went to a Waste Management transfer station in Deerfield Beach. It was sent from there to Waste Management’s large recycling center in Pembroke Pines.
City officials say this is how recycling is supposed to work.
Russell Ketchem, Director of Environmental Services: “So it will go from the truck that picks it up off the street to a transfer station and then is transferred to a recycling processing facility in Pembroke Pines.”
Our box in Dania Beach was tracked to this Waste Management transfer station in Davie, where we lost the signal. Though we don’t know exactly what happened, an AirTag that is crushed into a recycling bale would be destroyed.
The wine bottle was picked up in Hollywood and also sent to a transfer station.
Less than 12 hours later, it pinged 178 miles away in Central Florida at the JED Landfill, where there is no recycling.
The airtag from FLL ended up at the South Broward Waste-to-Energy Plant. It was burned and turned into power, which is sold to Florida Power & Light.
Heather Walker: “Do you think your recycling is being recycled?”
Steven Price: “Uh, I have no idea. The cans and bottles, I assume, are, but the plastic, I doubt it. But we do the best we can.”
Airport authorities in a statement said, “Unfortunately, recyclables typically end up being mixed by airport users with non-recycled waste like food, liquids, plastic bags, etc…” which means they have to go out with the trash to be burned.
Hollywood city officials also blame contamination for the wine bottle being sent to the dump. If collection workers believe the load is too contaminated, they send the load out as trash.
In Pompano Beach, collection workers don’t have to pick up a bin that has the wrong items inside it.
Russell Ketchem: “He has the last look to say, ‘This is a go, no-go.’ And if he looks in the bin and it is full of contamination, then it’s a no-go. Because it’s remarkable how little contamination and the type can mess up a whole truck.”
The end result for Broward County? Three out of four of our test items appeared to have been recycled.
On Wednesday, we test Miami-Dade County and look deeper into why so much of our recycling ends up in landfills.
Heather Walker, 7News.
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