tRash to

Treasure

Now you know what happens to all those dirty diapers and half-eaten sandwiches (a.k.a. the icky trash) and bulk trash. but what about the so-called clean trash — the stuff that goes in the blue recycling bins?

Here’s how it works: t he city’s sanitation services department collects recyclables from the single-family and community recycling bins. t hose recyclables (30,000 tons in 2008) are shipped to the city’s recycling processor Greenstar at Northwest Highway and Shiloh in Garland — which separates the materials into marketable packages, and sells the materials to buyers (except for glass and non-recyclable contaminants). the city’s share of the 2008 revenue that GreenStar earned from those sales was $2.2 million.

Any recycled glass is delivered to the Mc c ommas b luff landfill — not for disposal but for beneficial reuse: t he landfill is able to crush the glass and use it as a gravel substitute for below-ground drainage features. (“ t hat reduces the amount of clean gravel we’d otherwise need to purchase for those drainage features,” Nix says.)

Any contaminants, roughly 10 percent of what Dallasites place in recycle bins (Nix says this is a low number), is sent to the Mc c ommas b luff landfill for disposal.

Recyclables: a city moneymakeR (soRt-of)

Yes, the city does make money on the old magazines, used water bottles and empty aluminum cans

It’s amazing what people throw away …

Ron Smith has seen a lot in his 10 years of working with landfills, including his two years here at McCommas Bluff. Like the time one of his crews found a dead body.

“We did have a deceased gentleman out here about a year and a half ago, and we called the police right away,” he says. “We’ve also had to call the police when we’ve found meth labs. That sort of stuff doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen.”

Then there was the time he unearthed a box with three Rolex watches and four large diamond rings.

“It turned out a family had been cleaning out their home and accidentally threw the box away, but we were able to return it to them,” he says.

“And another time Sears dropped off five refrigerators, which we now use in our offices. That’s what they call ‘salvaging’ — it’s a legal term.”