Earth Day Recap, Part 2: MKE Recycles
Following up on my Earth Day recap, one of the more alarming moments of the Milwaukee Riverkeeper cleanup on Saturday was that we were cleaning up within feet of the MKE Recycles facility. It was clear that we were cleaning up most of the trash that was simply getting blown across the railroad tracks, because a majority of what we were picking up were recyclables, or items that people may think are recyclable in Milwaukee (bubble wrap, plastic grocery bags, foam).
But as I've grown my knowledge about environmental sustainability, I've realized how little the general public receives education about recycling — the process, what's accepted and where, how to maximize the possibility that what you discard will actually get recycled, and most importantly, how low the rate of recycling truly is.
I didn't know until I started writing this post that the properties of foam does actually make it recyclable. I had so much guilt — as counterintuitive as that is, as I was cleaning up trash — when I picked up foam sheets during the cleanup, because they completely and entirely disintegrated. Thousands little flakes broke apart (probably millions of we're speaking in micro terms) into the soil. The same thing happened with plastic grocery bags.
Click on the image. Zoom in! You’ll see more of how this plastic disintegrates into tiny pieces. They may be seemingly microscopic and harmless, but plastic doesn’t fully decompose — at least not for hundreds of years — and its chemicals seep into our groundwater, then eventually flowing into our bodies of freshwater (aka our drinking water!). Note: at this cleanup site, the river was within feet of us, so those chemicals don’t need to travel very far.
It got me upset, every time I picked up a piece of garbage, then looked up at the recycling facility across the tracks. It felt very ironic. So I walked over to the facility, looking doomy and ominous on a rather dreary day, for a peek after the cleanup. There were massive piles of trash just out in the open, ready for the wind to pick up the loose pieces and carry them off to the river next door.
The facility does have some of the property fenced off, but it’s a chainlink fence and those open spaces aren’t accomplishing anything, in terms of blocking pollution from getting swept away. The barbed wire along the fence line was wrapped with plastic grocery bags, clearly breaking down in the wind and again, throwing plastic all throughout the area.
I’ll stop there for now, because I decided that I should probably give the facility the benefit of the doubt and educate myself further about their operations before I go berating them on the internet. A quick search online showed me that the Milwaukee Recycles facility offers tours through Keep Greater Milwaukee Beautiful. So I took the tour and I’d love to share with you what I learned in my next post.
