Stay in New Orleans

Stay in New Orleans

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Here are the two lines where most of the people work. Glass is separated on the left by throwing clear/colored glass items into the correct chute which drops it onto a conveyor belt which takes it to a bin for glass of that type. Currently only clear is separated out and that seems to be a low priority; that sorting is not done if we are short on staff. There are enough chutes and conveyor belts to sort clear, green, and brown glass with what's left being 'other glass'. If it isn't sorted, it is all 'other glass'. On the right is the plastic/aluminum can sorting line.
Here is Bridget at the controls at the start of the line on the right (the glass line). She is the line supervisor and is very nice. She sometimes complains that they give her a lot of grief if things don't go smoothly, but she has no ability to hire, fire, or even write up people. What to do? She is about 35 and has six kids, oldest 16. Here, she always sounded stuffed up as her nose is crooked (from a fight with her 'old man'), but she took a week's vacation and had that fixed. She often works here and picks off the non-glass items (to be fed through our line on the left) and clear glass. You can tell she is a regular B.F.I. employee as she is wearing a fluorescent jacket with her name on it. After my last day of work, I came back for a bit in the morning and took the pictures that I couldn't get while working.
Here is the person who replaced me. I never learned his name; I try to learn one new name a day, but never got his. With all the temps there, many people don't learn names. I was 'Pop' (because of my white beard I presume) and Edgar was 'Amigo' (because of his Portugese descent). Anyway he was working the clear glass line. Clear glass items would be thrown into the chute (not shown). Tin/steel cans would go into a blue recycling bin (see picture two above) in front of him while plastic bottles (mostly filled with liquid to get on this line) would go into the bin behind him. When the bins got full they would be dumped into the tin can bin or onto our plastic sorting line . They were running short of vests and he never got one. I left mine (after washing it as best I could) so maybe he will get it.
My normal station was in front of the first perforator on the sorting line on the left. It was for milk jug plastic and it is normally staffed with two people. On the day I came back to take pictures it was staffed with Edgar and Bridget. Here is Edgar Menezes. He is from Goa, India (previously a Portugese colony) and is of Portugese descent, though he speaks English quite well with an Indian accent. When the line was running fast, I could throw as many as four jugs a second into the perforator (using both hands of course) which was pretty fast. Iris, Bridget, and Billie can all sort quite fast as well.
Each perforator drops whatever we feed it into the bin below. Here is the white milk plastic bin when it is pretty full (about eight feet deep here and eighteen feet across) as I would see it over the 'fence'. Beyond the bin is a holding area for unsorted and uncompacted cardboard. They are trying to catch up on the cardboard and that is where I have seen the two rats I saw. They have stopped running the mixed recyclables sorting line on weekends after the Sunday I worked and have even been cutting back to shorter days some times, sometimes as short as 11 hours. They still need to catch up on compacting of cardbaord.
Here is Iris with Claude in the background. Iris ran the line the week that Bridget was on vacation. Iris is very hard working and takes her work very seriously (gets upset when things aren't done well). She has a very cajun accent that I was just able to understand OK at the end. Here she and Claude are standing at their normal location in front of the plastic perforator for clear/green plastic soda/cold drink bottles. It is the second perforator along the line. When it is slow, Iris also picks out steel/tin cans and drops them into a bin at her feet (as seen here).
Here is Dalton at his normal position, the last perforator for other recyclable plastic (solid colored 1 and 2 plastic). There is often another person to sort the solid colored plastics with Dalton catching anything we missed (notice the three blue bins at his feet and two his right), but here he is doing both jobs. When the line is running fast (and the material is deep) it is easy to miss something (that is hidden underneath another item) and Dalton gets lots of work.
Here is a five second video of the whole team in operation (from Dalton's end of the line). It is 120K and about a forty second download. On the last two days that I was there, the first perforator was broken so that milk jugs had to be thrown over the 'fence'. It was still broken when I made this video as you can see.	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.
The last step on the plastic/metal line is a really cool device that picks out the aluminum cans based on their weight and wind resistance. You have to see it to believe it, so here is a five second video (120K, about 40 second download, should be truncated) showing it in action. What makes it so cool as the cans seem to violated the laws of physics and accelate and arc up rather down. It is not magic, though, but rather depends on air jets to take advantage of the low mass and large size of aluminum cans.	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.
Those things that the aluminum separator and Dalton didn't catch fall through to another conveyor belt underneath the one shown which carries trash back to trash dumpster. However, the last step is Billy (shown here) who picks out any tin cans or anything else that we missed. His station is beyond the tin can separator on the left and about four feet below the other people on the line. If that description of where his station is located is too confusing, a previous view had shown the bins where he puts what he sorts. I made a five second video of Billie in action (120K, about 40 second download), but rotated my camera for a better view, forgetting that I don't have software to rotate the video. I corrected that mid-video, ouch! You can tell Billie is a temp because of the flourescent vest. About half the staff of the Recycling Center is temps and most were temps before they became employees.
The very last step is when the trash gets dropped into a dumpster. I was very happy that the operation is set up to maintain the purity of the resulting recyclables (so that it can be used economically) while also minimizing the amount of trash (or rejected materials). Of course that makes perfect business sense as they accept recyclables without fees, but have to incur expenses to dispose of the trash.