Correspondents' Correspondence Urban Ore
WARWICK, MAL
Correspondents' Correspondence BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAL INTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS. Urban Ore San Francisco—The swelling wave of...
...Integrating a shredder, an air classifier, magnetic and flotation separators, and various screening devices, the plant can handle as much as 500 tons of garbage a day...
...This pilot project was supported by the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Center for Resource Recovery, a nonprofit corporation founded by labor and industry...
...Bacterial action—converting ground garbage into compost—is another possible recycling process, but the method is still too expensive to compete with commercially manufactured chemical fertilizers...
...These include: a ballistic sorting machine that hurls dense metals farther than paper and plastics, complete with a rotating paddle wheel for smashing through trash the way a riverboat chums through mud...
...Sunset President Leonard Stefanelli calls his new metal separator "an important step toward turning our transfer station into a total system for recycling salvageable materials...
...In an operation similar to those in Atlanta, Chicago and Oakland, 2,500 tons of Bay Area trash move each day through the Sunset processing center, borne along on conveyor belts past magnetically charged rollers that attract tin cans and other iron-based items...
...Ironically, he has been thrust out of the lime and into the limelight by the same ingenious technology responsible for our resource bind in the first place...
...An experimental refuse-processing plant at Franklin, Ohio-a small town between Dayton and Cincinnati—has been successfully employing several of these mechanisms for nearly two years now...
...Created by the Los Angeles By-Products Company, it is being run under the aegis of Sunset Scavenging, one of two privately owned retrieval firms that ride herd over San Francisco's waste...
...Perhaps they are holding out for an "Abominable Separator...
...Americans still recycle less than 3 per cent of the cans and bottles manufactured each year, and about one-fifth of the paper...
...As yet, however, Franklin's experiment is only that, and even San Francisco's proven magnetic process is relatively unusual...
...Many mechanical devices have already been developed to help make Stefanelli's dreams come true —though some fall short of being economically ideal...
...a behemoth of the future that would stalk the landfills of the continent and bring forth treasure from the trash of their merchandise-glutted land.—Mal Warwick...
...and a horizontal air stream that separates shredded waste into bins according to the resistance offered by different materials...
...In San Francisco, the "world's largest" metal separator, a thundering, noxious, $700,000 machine, recently went into service...
...The remaining refuse goes into other trucks, and is carried to the municipal garbage fill site 32 miles south of San Francisco...
...American engineers—true to the economic imperative that has them working in a self-generating cycle?have so far come up with over 50 mechanical retrieval methods for ferreting out the reusable paydirt, of which the most profitable is magnetic metal sorting...
...a pulper, much like an enormous kitchen blender, that spins out heavier elements from lighter ones, and pours fiber pellets into a spout, ready to be turned into roofing material or cardboard...
...About 40 tons of ferrous metal products?worth $2 a ton-are then shuttled down a hopper into a fleet of trucks bound for Nevada, where they are converted for use in the copper-mining industry...
...Not content to remove a mere million cans a day from the city's waste...
...Urban Ore San Francisco—The swelling wave of ecology-consciousness is giving us a new American folk hero: the garbage scavenger who mines our "urban ore" for recyclable materials, thus helping to save society from its own excesses...
...Both of the city's scavenger firms now rescue cardboard and bundled newspapers from their daily take, and they hope eventually to isolate other reusable rubbish, such as glass, wood fiber and organic substances...
Vol. 56 • June 1973 • No. 12
