Plastic Bag Edition
Like a good environmentalist , you gather your avalanche of stretchy plastic — grocery , dry cleaning , newspaper , cereal , sandwich and produce bags , even bubble wrap ; recycling is fun ! — and deposit it at your nearest collection site at CVS , Job Lot and Dave ’ s , to name a few . The bags are collected by the RIRRC , baled together and sold to plastic film remanufacturers , where the bale is shredded down , melted and / or ground into pellets . At the remanufacturing facility , the bags will be made into new plastic film .
ON THE WEB : Visit RIMonthly . com / cleanups for a list of nearby litter cleanup organizations where you can keep the trash we make out of local parks , rivers and the ocean .
Ready , Set , Sort
Mattress Edition
Test your recycling know-how with “ Ready , Set , Sort ,” a new waste-sorting computer game from the RIRRC that ’ s fun for kids and weirdly addictive for adults . The best part ? Unlike shoddy sorting in real life , “ Ready , Set , Sort ” doesn ’ t have consequences . Drag an item to the wrong bin — lidded coffee cups got us on level 5 ; those are trash-bound — and you can try again . Stick with it long enough and you can build your own fun park , complete with jumping gorillas , a giant Del ’ s cup , a princess castle and more . The park ’ s skyline is the best part , with fan faves like the Big Blue Bug , the Towers , the Superman building and more . And , bonus , you get a very special Certificate of Achievement at the end of all five rounds . rhodeislandresource . recycle . game – C . N .
You ’ ve finally wrangled your old mattress out of the garage and off to a collection site in your community or to Ace Mattresses in West Warwick . But how is an innerspring or memory foam mattress resurrected ? First , it is sliced open and the layers are separated by type . Foam padding is compressed and recycled into carpet or animal bed padding ; fibers are also compressed and recycled into oil filters or other textile applications . Box springs are extracted for scrap metal recycling . Finally , wood frames are recycled into mulch or burned as an alternative fuel source .
Info via the Mattress Recycling Council , which developed RI ’ s mattress recycling program in 2016 — the third of its kind in the nation . To date , Rhode Islanders have recycled more than 334,000 mattresses . The MRC , an initiative of the International Sleep Products Association , lobbied for the state ’ s $ 16 fee on mattress and box spring sales to support the recycling initiative .
Toxic Waste Edition
You drop off household waste at one of several EcoDepots a month and then what ? In partnership with Clean Earth , the RIRRC consolidates old latex paint to be remanufactured for industrial and commercial uses . Flammable and combustible substances — think : gasoline or propane — head to waste-to-energy facilities . And everything else is someone else ’ s problem ; unrecyclable toxic household waste is sent out-of-state to special hazardous waste landfills . rirrc . org / ecodepot
RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY l MARCH 2021 45