Ask your friends and neighbors about recycling and you’ll hear some strong opinions — often the belief that it all ends up in a landfill. To see what really happens to Teller County’s recyclables, the Courier reached out to APEX Waste with a request to follow the trail.

Terry Vaughn, the general manager for APEX in Teller invited the Courier to see the local transfer station and arranged access to the facilities that process recycled materials.

APEX partners with state-of-the-art facilities to keep valuable materials in the domestic supply chain and out of landfills. The facilities that do this are inspiring achievements in American ingenuity and engineering. Who knew trash could make one feel so patriotic?

The recycling journey begins with Teller County residents who participate in the process. Currently, APEX customers must opt into the recycling program which carries an additional cost, but legislative changes in Colorado’s Extended Producer Responsibility Law will shift that expense from the consumer to the producer — likely within the year.

Though similar trucks collect both the recycling and trash for APEX in Teller, they are collected by different trucks, and the contents are kept separated. Once collected, recyclables go to the transfer station in Divide. Yes, this is the same transfer station your trash goes to, but again, the recyclables are collected at one side of the station and landfill-bound trash on the other.

When there is enough recyclable material collected, it is sent to the primary Materials Recovery Facility in Colorado Springs which is operated by Waste Management. This MRF processes cardboard and paper waste.

The comingled recyclables delivered by APEX are offloaded and fed onto a conveyer belt that jostles the pulp materials to the top. Cardboard travels across a series of slanted wheels that divert glass, plastic and metal to a fall-through. The non-paper materials will be transferred for further sorting.

Cardboard and paper continue toward the compactor and baler, and employees remove any materials missed by the mechanical process. The carboard is then compacted into 1500–1700-pound bales and sold to North American paper mills where they’re turned into new cardboard, paperboard and paper products.

Jim Clark, the MRF supervisor in Colorado Springs has been with Waste Management for 18 years.

“The advances we’ve made since we phased out shipping recyclables to China are game-changing,” Clark said. “Years ago, we got far less materials and could not keep up. Now we are processing and shipping out 3,000 tons a month, and we have days that the whole yard is processed by noon.”

Non-paper recyclables are trucked to another, more advanced MRF in Denver. The automated system in Denver uses magnets and eddy currents to sort the metals. Glass is ground and separated from plastics. Plastics are sorted by AI optics and air currents before being baled by type for repurposing. When these commodities leave the MRF, they’re sold to processors right here in North America, and many are utilized within Colorado.

Metals are infinitely recyclable. Though there’s global demand for recycled metals, much of what’s collected in Colorado stays here. Scrap metal is used for sheeting and new products, some of which is produced in Denver.

Colorado is beer country, and both the Coors Brewing Company and the Larimer Budweiser plant are major consumers of recycled aluminum and glass. In fact, approximately six weeks after your recycled cans arrive at the Denver MRF, they are fully recycled and back on the shelf in the store.

Glass, too, is infinitely recyclable, and all glass can be recycled as brown glass which is ideal for beer. Your recycled glass bottle can become a new glass bottle on a Coors conveyor in as little as 30 days.

Innovations in repurposing plastics have made great strides since the early days of the recycling movement. Bottles, jugs and tubs are readily transformed to new containers, textiles and plastic lumber like that used for decking. And new innovations are constantly finding fresh applications for these materials.

Though the environmental upside of recycling is well known, the geopolitical and economic upsides tend to be underexplored.

Most aluminum ore and new aluminum come from outside the US. Importation costs and tariffs make new aluminum a contributor to inflation. Because aluminum can be recycled indefinitely and is easily recycled in the US, the estimated 50% of all aluminum cans being sent to the landfill translates into about $800 million dollars of deficit and waste each year.

The US pioneered aluminum recycling 1904, yet half of our aluminum is going to waste. It defies reason considering we spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year to import replacement aluminum from countries like Russia, China and India.

Plastics are a petroleum product. As uncertainty in the Middle East has made the oil market volatile, increased oil prices will lead to an uptick in the cost of new plastics. Fortunately, there is an ample supply of recyclable plastics already on hand. Increased recycling will temper plastic production’s contribution to inflation both at the store and at the pump.

An estimated 50 to 75-percent of household waste can be recycled. Nationally, only about 30% of household recyclables are being recycled. Sadly, Teller County lags far behind the national average. Only 10% of APEX customers in Teller County recycle, and in the months of January and February, designated recyclables accounted for a mere 5% (by weight) of the waste collected locally by APEX.

While visiting the Divide transfer station, it was easy to see that at much of the refuse directed to the landfill could have been recycled if more residents made the effort.

“We’re constantly battling beliefs based on old information and misinformation,” said Amelia Kovacs, a sustainability representative with APEX. “Prior to 2018, comingled recyclables were baled and sent overseas. The contamination rates were so high that China stopped importing US materials.”

There was a lag time before the US had enough recycling infrastructure come online, and overlapping with the pandemic didn’t help. There was definitely a window where a lot of recycling had nowhere to go.

However, this is no longer true. Evidenced by the sophisticated equipment in the regional supply chain, US ingenuity has risen to the occasion, and we are now reclaiming the $11B of recyclable materials previously sent to China.

“We’re glad the Courrier reached out to us so we can show the community how seriously we take our responsibility to keep important resources and unnecessary waste out of our landfills and how we continue to improve the process every year,” Kovacs said.

For those new to recycling, there are some essential dos and don’ts.

All glass bottles and jars are suitable for recycling. Plastic packaging marked with a recycle symbol and holds its shape when empty like tubs, jugs, bottles, and cups are safe to add to your bin. Cardboard should be clean and flattened, and it can be comingled with household paper. Metal cans and scrap metal of all kinds like tin, aluminum and steel should be recycled.

To avoid contaminating the recycling process, make sure materials are empty. Food containers do not need to be washed, but they should be rinsed or scraped to remove residual food material. Do NOT put recyclables in bags. The sorting process is highly automated, so bagged recyclables are mistaken for trash and diverted to the landfill.

Frequently misplaced items that should NOT go into the recycle bin are plastic bags of any kind, plastic wrap, Styrofoam, paper food service products like cups and plates and greasy pizza boxes. Compostables like food waste and yard waste do not go in your recycling. Hazardous materials like batteries or electronics require specialized recycling not yet available from APEX.

Recycling is not just an environmental thing—recycling has significant benefits to both the US and Colorado economies. If you don’t recycle for the environment, do it for the economy, and if not for the economy, do it for the beer industry. There are unlimited incentives to participate.