Courtesy of CBS News, New York.
Education Director Kara Napolitano recently hosted CBS News New York, city workers and climate sector employees during a tour of the recycling facility in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. She also sat down with reporter Hannah Kliger to discuss recycling education, and the facility’s Recycling Education Center. See the full article below:
NEW YORK — Two and a half miles of conveyor belts transport hundreds of tons of recyclable material a day at this 11-acre facility in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
And machines unload mountains of metal, glass, and plastic from barges and sanitation trucks.
Kara Napolitano is the Education Director of Balcones Recycling, which manages the facility.
Most of the residential recyclable material in New York City comes through these doors, she says, except for materials coming from Staten Island and Lower Manhattan, which go to Balcones’ smaller center in Jersey City.
Recycling education
The Brooklyn facility also runs an education center meant to show people what happens to their recyclables.
“I think a fifth grader is going to get something different than like a design student or a packaging designer. But hopefully at least people learn what to put in their recycling bins and that again, if they do that, we are actually going to sort it and sell it,” Napolitano tells CBS News New York Reporter Hannah Kliger.
The education center’s target audience ranges from third graders to tech entrepreneurs.
CBS News New York went on a tour organized for city workers and climate sector employees.
“It’s… really quite inspiring and potentially a little concerning just how much waste or material we’re producing. But then you step to the other side of it and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, this system is amazing. It’s so elegant,'” says Tom O’Keefe, who works with startups in climate tech.
“This facility is called a Materials Recovery Facility or a MRF for short. And we are the largest MRF in North America because we receive the most tonnage, we receive 800 to 1,000 tons a day,” Napolitano says.
“Giant pieces of machinery” and “different scientific processes”
That amounts to a jarring volume for visitors like Aly Hudson, who works at a climate tech startup called Terralytiq.
“This scale is massive. So you walk into a room and there are these giant pieces of machinery and all of these different scientific processes from sorting metal based on magnetic quality or lasers for grades of plastic. So there’s a lot of thought that’s gone into this,” Hudson says.
The campus sells the material to various companies around the country which reprocess for reuse.
By pulling back the curtain, it also educates more than 6,000 people annually about sustainability.
“All the things we use and touch and buy and throw away, where do they come from, how are they made, what natural resource is extracted from the planet to make these things that we sort of take for granted?” she says, encouraging people to consider these things as they visit the center.
