A trash tour worth taking

The new recycling plant is amazing -- but not world-saving

North America’s largest recycling facility is in . . . Columbus! Don’t get too happy about it.

The Rumpke Recycling and Resource Center on Joyce Avenue thunders with conveyors, screeners and separators as up to 60 tons per hour of our beer cans, yogurt tubs, water bottles, junk mail and other items are sorted, baled and sent to businesses that turn them into new products and materials.

I toured the place recently.

The 226,000-square-foot plant was opened in 2024, replacing a smaller facility near the fairgrounds. It receives trash from more than 50 Ohio counties and recovers up to 98 percent of it for re-use, the company says.

All day long, trash trucks pull into the facility and dump their loads on a concrete floor. With the aid of a lot of technology, moving parts and a few humans, all that mess gets sorted, with glass going one way, metal another, plastic another etc.

Most of the resulting bales and crates of recovered material are purchased by Ohio companies that turn it into drain pipes, cardboard boxes, glass bottles, plastic containers and other products.

It’s a profit-making enterprise. Rumpke collects what it can recover and sell to its industrial customers. That’s why it’s constantly emphasizing what should and shouldn’t be in our curbside bins. And why it employs people whose job is to pluck from fast-moving belts some of the unwanted materials (plastic bags, wire and carpet, for example) before they get farther downstream and gum up the works.

Isn’t it great to have such a facility to handle our recyclables? Of course. Will it save the world? Of course not.

When the Rumpke plant opened last year, Joe Lombardi, executive director of the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio, praised it in the Columbus Dispatch but also noted that while more than 96 percent of the homes in central Ohio have curbside recycling, most of the material entering those homes ends up in the landfill he operates.

That’s partly because we consume too much, partly because Rumpke recycles only what it can sell and mostly because much of the waste we generate is not recyclable — even if, as in the case of plastics, it has the arrows and numbers on it that lead people to think it is.

Here’s a dismal statistic for you: Studies have estimated that about 5 percent of plastic waste in the United States actually gets recycled. Hence all the reports about oceanic trash islands, exported waste and the amount of plastic we carry in our bodies. If you want a dismaying look at where some of our refuse goes, my wife recommends Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash, a book by Alexander Clapp. (I haven’t read it yet, but the reports I get from her are eye-opening.)

Don’t get me wrong — I’m delighted that the Rumpke plant gives me the opportunity to do at least a little to address our waste problem by sending my commercially valuable refuse to a place where most of it does get recovered for reuse. But neither I, nor my country, are doing enough.

Also not everyone shares my enthusiasm about recycling..

Our Rumpke tour guide told us that, despite 226,000 square feet of evidence to the contrary, there are still people who think recycling is a hoax. They think the stuff in the curbside recycling bins is just trashed, like everything else.

Well that would be quite an elaborate hoax, considering that the Rumpke plant cost $100 million to build. Doubting that it’s real is the trash-industry equivalent of doubting the moon-landing.

If you want to spend a couple of hours getting educated on where at least some of your waste goes after it leaves your home, I recommend the tour. Details here. And if the tour makes you, like me, ponder how much more we need to do, well I recommend that, too.