The Rocky Mountain Collegian

Issue date: 4/20/09 Section: News

Media Credit: Brandon Iwamoto Workers at the Waste Management waste recycling facility at 5395 Franklin St. in Denver sort through items on a conveyor belt on Wednesday morning as they make their way through the facility.

The moment an aluminum can leaves your fingertips and careens into the depths of a recycling bin, it is out of sight and out of mind. But it does not just disappear; it instead embarks on cross-state journey to be reborn into something new. 

In 2008, CSU collected an average of 35,000 pounds of recyclables per week Sheela Backen, operations manager for CSU Recycling and Integrated Solid Waste, said.

That number represents a massive pile of aluminum cans and other materials, and eventually all those pounds of CSU recyclables will be reincarnated. First, however, they go to a single stream processing plant owned by the national company Waste Management in Denver. 

CSU introduced a single-stream recycling system on campus for the first time this semester, meaning that all recyclable materials, including that aluminum can, can be tossed into the same bin without the need to sort them, said Aaron Briscoe, equipment operator for CSU Recycling and Integrated Solid Waste Services.

Backen said that after a can is recycled on campus, it will wait inside the bin until it is emptied and taken to the recycling areas outside of campus buildings. From there scheduled trucks that cart all recyclables to the recycling center at Larimer County Landfill will pick it up.

"We have compactors there to pack as much in as possible," said Rose Watson, environmental educator for Larimer County Solid Waste Department, in describing the process. 

From there, the recycling center packs trucks to the brim with Larimer County recycling matter and hauls it to the northeast industrial regions of Denver, where Waste Management's recycling plant resides. 

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