Stay in New Orleans

Stay in New Orleans

Click here to see the next page in this series.

Click on the back button of your browser or click here to see the previous page in this series.

Click on any of the little pictures to see it full size (as big as it goes).

I have been working on the plastic/glass/metal sorting line. Here are the stairs we climb to get to the line (it is about 12 feet up) as you would see it on your right just after you enter main entrance. Here we are just coming off break. The entire team is eight to ten people.
Here is a view from the back of the building a truck having just dropped off a load of recyclables to be sorted. I was there at just the right time to get a video of it dumping, but it was cold and the battery in my camera was low (and cold) and I only got one second of it (40K, about 10 second download). Drats! What to do.
Here is the view from behind the building of the mixed recyclables awaiting sorting. You can also see the smaller Bobcat that they use to push the recyclables into place for sorting. I also got a short two second video of the Bobcat (a front end loaded of sorts) pushing the material into place (32K, about 10 second download) In the weeks before I came they had had a really large backlog, but are now pretty well caught up. If you want to see a close up of a Bobcat I have a close up of one.
The Bobcat pushes the material into a sort of pit with a conveyor belt at the bottom. Here is the view from inside the building of the wall that the material is pushed against with an opening at the very bottom where the conveyor belt drops the material to be sorted. The speed of the conveyor belt is determined by a knob on the sorting line controls (shown later). That determines how quickly the material is fed to the sorters.
From there is a large conveyor belt to carry the mixed recyclables from about five feet below ground level up to about 22 feet above ground level. Here it is without any particular load (though I don't see it much). This belt moves about a foot a second. Just to the right of the belt is Bruce's station on the sorting line.
Here is a picture of Bruce at his normal station. He uses a rake to get newspapers and such off the conveyor belt (to his right) and into the chute in front of him where it drops into a trash dumpster directly below him. Bruce is a temp as he is wearing flourescent vest, not the flourescent jacket given to employees. He also has been there a long time.
The conveyor belt dumps the mixed recyclables into what looks like a giant perforated cement mixer (top part of this picture). That area really isn't well lit, so that is true perspective. Anyway, most of the steel/tin cans are collected magnetically and drop into their bin directly below the separator. The glass bottles fall through and are fed to the line on the right while the rest is fed across to the next divider (to the left of this picture).
Here is a 3 second video (80K, about 25 second download) of the separator in action. The building is not shaking, but rather my hand is not as steady as I would like when taking this video. That is a problem with vidoes. What to do? You can see the mixed recyclables falling in from the rear and getting broken up as it rotates. The breaking up is important as much of the feed has been compacted and many items are stuck together. One of our problems in sorting is items of different types which have been crushed together. If you get sound with the video, there really is a roar like a thunder storm whenever it is in operation.	If your browser is not set up to show movies you will get an error dialog box instead of a player and can just press cancel.
This is the sign we pass as we climb the steps to the sorting line. With that sort of racket, there is good reason for B.F.I. to require us to wear ear plugs. Also, the team normally communcates with taps and gestures rather than even trying to communicate over the noise. With the broken glass and such, the need for gloves and safety glasses is pretty obvious.
When I was sorting milk jugs and had a spare moment I would enjoy looking just underneath that first separator at a sort of waterfall of broken glass and such dropping onto the right hand return conveyor belt (trash back to the dumpster. Here is a six second video of it (120K, about 40 second download). I think the backlighting is what made it really pretty to me, though the video really doesn't capture it well.	If your browser is not set up to show movies you will get an error dialog box instead of a player and can just press cancel.
Here is the view of the separator above from the ground and right side of the line. You can see the chute from the 'mixer' ( top right) into the tin can bin. It gets about 95% of the steel cans and we only see (and then collect) the remaining 5%. However, as we generally don't see all the cans it collects, it looks like it misses bunches (as we see each bin we collect and dump). You have to look at the pile at the bottom of the chute after a few hours to really appreciate that it does get the vast majority. It also has fair accuracy in that about 95% of the items in its pile are steel cans. The others probably got caught/knocked into the wrong place (as with the steel cans it misses). The 95% accuracy is probably OK when you consider that with labels, lids, and extraneous contents, even 100% sorting accuracy would still be only about 95% steel/tin (by my estimate) with the rest attached materials. Picture needs to be rotated.
On the left is the next step where some of the paper/plastic bags are separated out (but less than half it seems). That is really behind and above the section you can see in this picture. The big turnip shaped section shown mostly just feeds the line on the left with everything else. The net behind it drops paper/plastic bags straight onto the trash return conveyor belt which dumps trash into the same trash dumpster that Bruce fed with the newspapers and such that he was able to pull out. You can also see my vest hanging up during break. It gets really filthy and I am only able to wash it once a week as there is no time for it to dry during the week.