N.C. recycling facility that serves Myrtle Beach sorts through mounds of trash

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. -- As it happens, no, you shouldn't put bowling balls in your recycling bin.

Or mattresses.

Or strings of Christmas lights.

Or dead animals.

Or any of the myriad off-kilter items that turn up regularly amid the tons of recyclables that are sorted and baled each day by machines and workers inside a cavernous warehouse east of the Crown Coliseum on Owen Drive.

So they're dealt with and the process continues.

This warehouse – a materials recovery facility owned by Pratt Industries – is the way station for glass, plastic, aluminum, steel and paper recyclables collected by numerous municipalities across southeastern North Carolina and northeastern South Carolina, including Myrtle Beach, Fayetteville, Lumberton, Pinehurst, Dunn, Stedman, Clinton and Whiteville.

Pratt won't detail the amount of recyclables that are handled at the facility, but Fayetteville's recycling program alone sent 8,790 tons there between June 2010 and July 2011.

Inside the warehouse, trucks dump the collected materials onto the concrete floor, where they're piled into huge, jumbled mounds of recyclable trash.

“Commodities,” corrected plant manager Charlie Walker.

Indeed, Walker said, Pratt sells all of it – or uses it in its own manufacturing operations, such as the paper which it processes into new products at its own paper mills.

Similarly, the milk jugs, aluminum cans, soda and water bottles, detergent jugs, cereal boxes, cat food cans, corrugated cardboard and glass bottles are all headed for new purposes somewhere.

First, though, it has to go through a sorting process that looks like something dreamed up by Rube Goldberg – though it works.

It's a maze of machines connected by dozens of conveyor belts on which recyclables whiz up and down and through huge rotating trommel screens, underneath a giant magnet, through an energy field and past several sets of watchful workers.

Each stage of the journey aims to refine the sorting.

The trommel screens spin to shake heavy stuff to the bottom of the pile and, if it's small enough, through perforations in the screen and onto a different conveyor line. Cardboard “floats” atop, which makes it possible to direct it someplace else.

A powerful and rapidly rotating magnet over one section of the line attracts steel cans with a clang as quickly as its centrifugal force flings them into a bin.

As the conveyor belt then drops like a waterfall, aluminum is flung outward and into its own bin by an energy field called an eddy current.

Workers stand at various points along the lines, ready to grab certain recyclables to toss into their respective bins – and to pull out any errant items that pass by.

“Bags,” said plant supervisor Shawn McDonald when asked which sort of “contaminant” she hates most. “Plastic bags.”

They can gum up the works, and there are all too many of them mixed among everything else.

On a recent day, the contaminant pile included garden hoses, a laundry basket, bits of polystyrene, a futon and lots of plastic bags.

Along one section of the sorting line, a dozen or so tennis balls that had made it that far were stuffed into a crevice. Two bowling balls lay on the ground.

For some reason, Walker said, bowling balls turn up in the recycling mix more often than you'd think.

Elsewhere, a string of Christmas lights tangled up part of a machine and briefly shut down the line.

“Christmas lights,” McDonald said, shaking her head.

Walker, who hadn't worked in the recycling business before he came to the 3-year-old MRF, said the job has made him aware of the importance of recycling.

“It changed my way of thinking,” he said. “I didn't realize how important it was to recycle.”

The MRF's processing ends with paper, plastic, metal and glass sorted into bales and piles for pickup.

“Somebody's using every bit of it,” Walker said.