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Once upon a time, there was no chance of an afterlife for newspapers or soda cans. They were taken to landfills to die rotting, smelly deaths. But today, there is hope for trash thanks to recycling. So what will the soda can appear as in its next life? It could be a carpet, a sneaker, a fence post

by Paul MOS!!!__sports editor

A half-empty can of Coke ~ies at the bottom of a paper bin. The piece of aluminum remains there for hours, covered by fax paper after fax paper, until it is picked up by the Browning-Ferris Industries truck. From there the can comes to the BFI recycling line, where it is scowled at.

Workers roll their eyes. Another misplaced item amongst a sea of recyclable products at the BFI recycling center.

This, according to Lori Cagnoli, recycling director of BFI King of Prussia, is one of her pet peeves about the recycling business: when people keep mixing ~g their trash.

According to Cagnoli, misplaced refuse is one of the biggest problems when recycling piles of trash that at times end up looking like the mother of all messes. This misplacement then, in turn, causes more work for the sorters.

No matter how much of a pain the task of sorting re- cyclables might seem, someone bas to do it, and it ap- ored containers such pears BFI workers are up to the task. Six individuals on as detergent bottles). an assembly line have the responsibility of sorting the re- After these items cyclable commodities into categories and discarding any are sorted into difnon-recyclable materials. The first worker's responsibili- ferent categories, all ty is to pull off the trash that can not be recycled-banana of them are pushed peels and such-then the trash goes over a trammel screen into cubes, except which discards all the ieces om the as- f for glass, and are sembly line. Fro ere, a magnet is used to pull all of~ shipped via rail or the alurninu cans to go into a different • tractor-trailer to Finally the s of the first worker manufacturing mills, continue the job and sort the items into different cate- where they are brought and then made into different gories depending upon the type of item they are dealing items. with.

"There is really a market for this stuff. It's all supply

Paper goes into two different piles, domestic and cor- and demand," Cagnoli said, pointing out there are many porate. Domestic consists of newspapers and magazines, different uses for recycled items. Among the many differwhile corporate paper contains office paper. ent uses for recycled materials besides product reproducGlass goes into three different categories by color: tion are: rugs made of broken glass, roads using broken green, clear, and brown. Plastics are assorted into three glass pieces in its asphalt and even a clothing line of different categories as well, PET l (soda bottles), PET 2 fleece recycled wear. (milk containers that arec!@ar}.and lastly PET 2A (col- Cagnoli said that everything can be recycled and the 1 only question that remains is whether or not it is cost effective.

Regardless, tons upon tons of recyclable material pass through the BFI plant every week. They have seen it all on the assembly line, Cagnoli contests. For example, in one incident, workers found a detergent container full of discarded diabetic needles. According to Cagnoli, this is just one example of what you can find on the line.

She said that because of things like that, precautions have to be taken and workers need to be careful. Workers are required to wear heavy gloves, hard hats, protective eye wear and ear protection.

Depending upon the size of a pile and the amount of sorting one has to do, Cagnoli said that her workers can get through sizable chunks during a day's work. Among other duties performed at the plant are efforts into the education of recycling. Whenever trash is not recycled correctly, BFI must contact the party and give them instructions on how to recycle correctly.

Next time you decide not to pay attention to where you throw your soda cans, remember, it does not end up in a magical hole where it disappears. It has to go somewhere, and if you just take a little more time in your care, you can make someone else's job a whole lot easier.

by Shanna Fanelli assistant features editor

(above left) The plastic bottles are bundled together according to color, with white bottles in one bale and colored in another. • {above) Glass is piled together in chunks and shards, and eventually shipped to mills where it will be melted down. • {left) Trucks drop off loads of recyclables all day long at the BF/ Recyclery in Valley Forge. The pile of plastics and glass moves up the conveyor belt to the assembly line, where it is sorted and separated by six different pairs of hands.

Why is it that March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb? Who knows? More importantly, who cares? What really matters is that the end of this schizophrenic month is the good-bye kiss to long, dark days and icy winds that make fingers cold and toes unbearable. Hail spring, period of birth, era of life and pre- lude to summer. So long winter, season of sickness, school and sub-zero degree temperatures.