Recycling at the Field
Perhaps you’ve noticed the blue recycling carts around The Field Museum, the customized recycling bins in the Field Bistro, Explorer Café and the Siragusa Center, and if you are here on Members' Nights, a variety of other recycling containers in the halls behind the scenes. If so, we hope you’ve found them easy to use! The Field Museum diverted 53% of its waste from landfills in 2016, with 31 tons of that amount being captured in the blue carts.
But what happens to those materials after they leave the Museum? Do they really get recycled into new products? On April 6, 2017, sustainability manager Carter O’Brien and volunteer Emily Woodworth took a tour of Lakeshore’s Heartland Recycling Center to find out.
Opened with new state-of-the-art machinery in the spring of 2016, this single-stream facility sorts, separates, and allocates over 2.3 million tons of waste material annually. Materials including paper, cardboard, glass, plastic, and metal are accepted, with the facility able to process 20 tons per hour.
One of the early stops in the automated process is the Fines Screen. Here, glass and all fine materials that are less than two inches in size are removed. Glass passes through the Glass CleanUp System, which cleans the glass coming off the Fines Screen by pulling off all the light fractions such as shredded paper. Glass is then sold to a local manufacturer, who in turn sorts it by color before using it as a raw material for new products.
The next type of material to be removed from the stream is cardboard. The OCC Screen (aka old corrugated containers) removes all of the larger cardboard pieces directly from the sorting process. Once removed, they are sent to the American Baler where they are bundled into compact cubes for easy transport.
Paper fiber is separated from glass, plastic, and metal in a two-step process. First, the News Screen uses a pitched series of rollers to tumble these materials. Heavier items succumb to gravity and fall to the bottom and continue their journey through the system for further sorting. Newspaper goes over the top into another collection receptacle. The second stage of this process is the Ballistic Separator. Materials that fell to the bottom in the last stage are sorted again, with a series of sloped paddles, into 2D (paper, plastic film, cardboard, fibers) and 3D (bottles and cans). As before, heavier 3D items bounce or roll downward, and lighter 2D items travel up the slope in the direction of the paddles. Plastic film is removed at this stage and sent to the Machinex Closed Door Baler.
Plastics are separated using an Optical Sorter. This is designed to optically scan the materials and generates a puff of air onto any plastics it deems to be PET (plastics marked #1).
Finally, recycling is not just good for the environment. It also can contribute positively to our local economy. Lakeshore works with a variety of local manufacturers to find the best use for these raw materials, with blue cart recycling being used to make everything from paper and cardboard products to bicycle frames to playground equipment.
