It’s been a week now since all of our Steppingstone interns have finished working with us. It was great having the interns around the shop, and if any of you are reading this: We sure miss you!

Amongst helping us accomplish much more then we thought possible in the store, they’ve done quite a bit else. While they’ve been with us, they have put their reuse skills to work and made some great projects. And if you haven’t seen the blog post that they wrote about the film Wasteland and the importance of reducing our consumption then you should definitely check it out. While it’s clear that they understand the importance of reducing and reusing; we thought that a field trip would be helpful for us all to think about the last part of the mantra “reduce,reuse,recycle”.

On our interns last day with us, we went for a tour at the Forge, the recycling center for Philadelphia’s residential and commercial waste.

At the Forge, we got a tour of the recycling center while it was operating. The tour started at the beginning of the sort line. We watched conveyer belts quickly moving a mixture of plastics, paper, aluminum, and anything else that gets put into our blue bins. As Philadelphia’s recycling is single stream, all of this material comes in together, and is sorted out mechanically and by hand. While it is definitely a step in the right direction, Philadelphia’s single stream does have some drawbacks. It is much easier with a single stream recycling system to have contamination occur in the final sort. It was not uncommon for us to find bales of paper with plastics and aluminum mixed in.

If the final bales are too highly contaminated, then there is a good chance that they will simply be sent to landfill once they arrive at their respective end market. While it is still common for much of our recycling to be shipped halfway across the world before it is turned into something new, it is important that it is not simply being shipped to India or China to be sent to landfill.

While there some plastic did end up with plastic and vice versa, the detail with which they sort such a massive amount of material at the Forge truly is impressive. But they can only do so much at the recycling center itself.

 While recycling is better than landfill, it still has an environmental footprint. Even some of the easiest plastics to recycle are made into non-recyclable materials such as plastic lumber and textiles that eventually end up in a landfill.

Then there is the environmental costs of shipping bales of paper to China to be processed at a papermill.

The real answer to our problems with the waste stream come from our over consumption. Our consumption rates are still simply unsustainable. While Philadelphia has made immense progress, it’s important to realize that it is always better to reduce and reuse.