 and I'm the Science and Technology Librarian here and I co-organized this series with Jessica Burton, who's the Executive Director of the Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative. Excuse my voice, I have the derided Portland cold. We are not gonna have an event next month, but we will be back in March and we also will have an Earth Day presentation and another one in May. And we'll take a little bit of a summer recess. There should be a survey in your chair, and I often make the joke that librarians love data, but if you could fill it out, it's really useful for us. You may or not be aware of this, but the funding that we get from the city pays for the building and the people, but it doesn't pay for the collections or for any of our programs. So this is really helpful information that we use when we're applying for grants and things like that. So thank you for your attention to that. And without further ado, we're really excited to have EcoMain's Senior Educational Person in Katrina. Welcome Katrina. Thank you. My name is Katrina. I am the Senior Environmental Educator for EcoMain and EcoMain is the company that takes trash and recycling from a lot of you. How many people are Portland residents? Keep your hands up, South Portland, Scarborough, Cape, Gorham, Windham, all other sorts of places. So we have 70 plus towns that we service and it's about 400,000 people total. So chances are you either live or work or visit a place that is a part of EcoMain and we take your trash and your recycling. So what we're gonna talk about tonight is kind of the journey of what happens to your trash and your recycling. And we don't want it to end up like the background here of like just a trash mountain. So we gotta take care of our place. And speaking of our place, here's our beautiful state of Maine. We're down here in Portland right now. This is where our facility is. So we're right around the corner from the airport. Has anyone ever visited EcoMain? Yay, open houses or tours? Fantastic. So we do give tours Monday through Friday. So if you're super pumped about what you see tonight, you can come visit it live and in the flesh. I've got cards up here. I can happily hand one out to you. We also have virtual tours on YouTube. So you can search EcoMain virtual if you don't wanna come to us or you're not able to come to us, we can come to you on your own computer. So you can see it all again on YouTube, which is pretty neat. But again, we take about 400,000 people's worth of material over around 70 towns. And I just like to show kind of the range of where we are. We're not just Portland area base, we're much farther. I also like to point out that if it's somewhere farther away, things are consolidated. So it's not just tiny truck after a tiny truck driving all the way down to Portland. So fun fact there. I actually should mention if your town was not on there, you and you have single sort, you're with a company called Casella. Sometimes Casella brings us stuff. Sometimes they bring them stuff. So it could still come to us from time to time. And your trash, if we weren't on one of our towns, again, could still come to us, but it also could go to a different waste to energy facility, which we'll talk about that word in a minute or it could go to what we call a whole trash landfill, which is not as much fun. So that's why this is really important. So waste hierarchy is one of those things of what should I try and do first, second, third, and so on. And from the time that we were little, we've probably heard reduce, reuse, recycle, right? But don't forget, it's reduce, reuse, recycle, compost, waste to energy, landfill. So it's even longer than you thought it was. So in order to reduce, it means we use less stuff, right? That's the whole mindset we should be thinking of. We live in a very consumer-heavy society right now of, oh, well, those shoes look really good and they're really cheap, so I'm just gonna buy them. Or, oh, there's other things on sale. I need that for my house. Or, oh, my friend has this, so I need that. So think first, do I need this? If you do, great, get it. If you don't, maybe don't get it yet or don't get it at all. I myself am guilty of that. Sometimes when I see something and I say, ooh, I really wanna buy that. And I think, do I already have one at home? Do I really need that? If it's a no, then I say, okay, forget about it. But it does take a while to train your brain to do that. The second one is reuse. Can you reuse stuff instead of single-use stuff? So who likes coffee or hot chocolate or tea? Anybody bring your own reusable container to the coffee shop? I went to scratch bakery this morning. Great place, right? And I asked for a small hot chocolate, which I was assuming would be here. They bring it to me. It's up here. But you still pay for a small. So I love my to-go mug because it's cheaper and it's a lot nicer for the environment. So plus I put fun stickers on it and I actually wanna take it everywhere I go. Instead of buying all those water bottles, Portland Water District supplies some of the best water in the country. I used to work for them, so I'm a little biased. But also it's delicious water. If anyone's ever lived in Madison, Wisconsin, like I did, it's not the best water. I love it there. They got the greatest ice cream, but they don't have great water. So our tap water here is incredible. Tap water is also more regulated than bottled water. So why not drink from the tap and bring your own container? Instead of all those plastic water bottles that really do add up, you might think, oh, it's just one a day. But how many times a day do you buy them? How many days a week do you get them? How many, you know, do you use them a year? So it's helpful to think about stuff like that. Reusing also expands to maybe you wash your hands and you dry your hands with a paper towel. Can you use that paper towel later as a tissue or to clean your countertop? Or maybe you go to a restaurant. Legally, they're not allowed to take the napkins back or reuse them for the next table that comes. So I always take extra napkins on my table home and I clean my countertop or my stove or whatever else needs cleaning. If I spill something on the floor and I don't want to use my sponge on the floor, it's really helpful to reuse those kind of things. But it extends even farther than that. What if you do buy a new pair of shoes? Can you give a pair away? What if you outgrow a shirt or blouse or a dress or anything? Can you give it away? Lots of times in our recycling facility, I see things that should have gone to Goodwill, Salvation Army, Yard Sale, Neighbor, whoever. We get perfectly good books. I remember I was on a tour once and I saw a nice pair of bean boots in the trash pile. We don't have the ability or the manpower or it's not even safe to pull things that could be reused and give them to Goodwill or other folks like that because we don't know what it's been touching. We don't know why it was thrown out in the first place and it's just not a safer productive thing for us to be able to do. So anything you can give away, please consider doing that instead of just chucking it and saying, oh, will someone else will take care of it? So using has so many, so many different uses even as far as your lunch, your grocery store, anybody, bring your own bags. I do have some bags on the back so if you feel reusable bag deficient at home, feel free to take one home. And then the next one is recycle. So remember two things before you even think about recycling something. And the main types of things that we recycle are your cardboard and your paper products, your metal products, your glass products and your plastic products. There are of course a lot of rules when it comes to recycling. We don't want your sharp and scary kitchen knives. We don't want your scary, scary saw blades. We get those. If they fly out of the machine, it's not great. We don't want your teeny tiny plastic pen caps because that's just not the type of thing that we recycle. We don't want your toilet paper for I hope obvious reasons. We don't want your dock poop. We don't want your kitty litter. So there's thousands of things that we don't want but thousands of things we do want. There are great lists in the back. It's called a do, don't list. Super simple. A green side is good. A red side is bad. On the red, it doesn't mean it's trash. So on the red side, there's clothes. There's plastic bags. So there's places you can bring clothes. Goodwill, South Asian Army. Yard sale, give them to your neighbor, et cetera. Plastic bags. I don't know if you know this, but you can bring them back to Hanoverts. Target, Shaws, Walmart, Whole Foods. Lots of different places. If you were to pick up one of those red and green placards on the back, it's got a picture that says plastic bags with a symbol through it. So no plastic bags. And under it, it says plasticfilmrecycling.org which is one of my favorite websites of all time. That tells you where you can take your films so it's not just bags. It's your grocery bags, your bread bags, your produce bags, your bubble wrap, your air pockets, your wrapping around your toilet paper, the wrapping around your paper towel, et cetera. And that goes off to make treks decking. And I'll pass this around. This is really cool. Hanoverts, Shaws, Walmart, Target. I can help you look up your local stores after the presentation, but there's gonna be some nearby you. Yes, sir. And you don't have to only bring Walmart bags, or bags to hand them for them. Correct. Yep, if they give them out, they take them back. And even with the bag band coming up next, actually this year, yay, the stores will still have to take them back. If they're empty and clean. If they're smeared with peanut butter or got other creepy stuff in there, they won't take them back. So they need those stuff clean and empty and dry. So I'll pass this around. This is treks decking. It's decking made out of your plastic films or plastic bags that you take back to grocery stores. And also it's got some sawdust in there too to help give it some bulk. And that comes from, let's just pretend a bench-making factory or a bed-making factory, something that makes excess sawdust. So that's Recycle. So we got Reduce, Reuse Recycle, and then we got Compost. Anybody compost at home? Garbage to Garden, we compost at Backyard Composting. Super pumped about that. So Composting is amazing. We want that food out of the trash because we don't recycle banana peels, right? It's not something that's even possible. So if you don't compost your food, it should go in the trash. So if you don't have a compost at home, no problem with that, put it in your trash can. But if you do, yay, compost turns into soil, which can then grow something new and wonderful. If you put your food in the trash can, it goes to our Waste to Energy Facility. That means trash to electricity. We take your trash, we put it inside our Waste to Energy building, and we combust it at about 2,000 degrees and turn it into electricity. What's left over is ash. So just think of like your Campfire ash. And we'll talk all about trash, the process of how it works, what we do with the ash, what we do with the electricity, and of course anytime you burn something, you're gonna make pollution. We're gonna talk about the pollution kind of in the second part. We'll touch on recycling first though. So what's left over is ash, which goes to our landfill. We own our own landfill. Nobody else gets to bring us stuff. It's only us. So we divert our ash from the Waste to Energy building to the landfill. So it's only filling up a little bit at a time instead of way more. Because we take your trash, it comes in 100% on the big trucks from your house, from your stores, from your businesses. We combust it or burn it. 10% is left over. That's pretty cool, right? So we'll talk more about trash later. But remember, reduce, reuse, recycle, compost before you even think about the trash, because we don't wanna fill this up. In order to cap a landfill, it's gonna cost us around $25 million. I don't wanna pay that in taxes to you. So we gotta fill that up as slowly as possible. And so the other things help. And this is one of my favorite pictures because I think this helps illustrate the problem a little bit, too. So this first line is we're gonna say, we're gonna trash stuff. So in order to make paper, we go to the trees. We cut them down. We turn them into paper in a wonderful, beautiful, long process. Turn them into paper and we'll make a greeting card. We'll make a book. We'll make some newspaper. We'll make wrapping paper. We'll make whatever you use, paper day to day. And we're gonna pretend you throw up the trash can when you're done with it. That trash truck is gonna take it and maybe it gets burned or combusted at EcoMain. Maybe you live somewhere else where it goes straight to a landfill, but no matter what, it ends up in a landfill. Can we pull paper out of a landfill, especially after it's burned, to then make more paper? No, so then we have to go back to the source, cut down some more trees, put them on a truck, make the paper. We're gonna use it and then trash it, truck it, landfill it. It's stuck here. Nothing's coming out of a landfill. So we always have to go back to the natural resource. And this is the same thing with your plastics. Anybody know where plastic comes from? Oil, petroleum byproduct. So drilling for oil, not especially fun or glamorous or cheap or safe or wonderful for the environment or the animals that live there. So if we can not come back to the source every time and maybe look at the second line here, we can save a lot of resources. Anybody know where metal comes from? Iron ore, metal ore, metal deposits under the ground. So again, we have to go to the land and it's not just as simple as like digging down and saying, ooh, look, I got some metal. We have to blow up the land. That means getting rid of the landscape that was there, the animals that live there. We have a lot of problems with that. And of course it's really dirty. Anybody read Barbara Kingsolver? Animal Dreams, reading that right now, talking about the mining's tailings and poisoning the water with the acidic materials and it's killing the fruit trees and all the things in the river. So mining also not very good. So if we can, instead of this, let's try this. So our metal ore, our petroleum products, our trees, if we start here and we make stuff and we try recycling it, it gets taken to be turned into something new and then it comes back to us in a different way. And then if we recycle it, it turns into something new and it comes back to us. So over and over again, we're using it. We're not wasting it in the landfill. So we're not always coming back here. So that's conservation of materials and resources is really important. A little fun fact. We're also making less pollution when we recycle too. So that's really, really great. So we're making less air pollution, less water pollution but actually overall, saves a lot of money. Up front, especially right now, recycling is more expensive than trash, which is unfortunate. Here in Portland, we don't have that problem because EcoMain was actually founded by 20 towns and those 20 towns don't have to pay and excess on recycling, but the other towns that we have do, we're kind of getting in the weeds as far as money goes but just know that recycling in the long term, if you are doing this is much, much, much cheaper both environmentally and fiscally than this here. Plus this is all trapped and sad in the landfill. We don't get to use it again, but down here, it's here for us to use. We have the paper we need. We have the plastics we need. We have the metal we need, the cardboard, et cetera. So why not recycle those the right way and then turn them into something new and wonderful? So let's focus on recycling for a little bit. We recycle major things called cardboard, paper, metal, glass, and plastic. Got some examples over here just because people like visuals. Anything you get in a box or in the mail, you get a new shoe box, you get maybe some granola bars from the store, some cereal from the store. That's all cardboard-y type stuff. Your coffee cups, totally fine. People think, oh, but they're waxy or they have maybe a little bit of coffee residue in there. Not a problem at all. If you're ever worried about things being waxy, whether it's your coffee cup or what we call aseptic containers, soup containers, broth containers, wine-in-a-box containers, or your soy milk, orange juice, things like that. If you're ever worried and think, oh, well, it's waxy, I can't recycle it, do the fingernail trick. If you don't have fingernails that protrude like my husband, you can use a penny or something else, but there's nothing underneath my fingernail. If you did this to a waxy container, you would definitely see wax because it would come right off. This is what we call poly-coated paper. So it is totally fine to recycle because whenever the paper gets pulped up on its process to be turned into new paper, the plastic is actually skimmed away because the plastic separates from the paper. Wax doesn't separate from paper, it stays. So waxy stuff can't recycle, but poly-coated or plastic-coated stuff totally fine to recycle with us, which is really great. And then all your paper items, I bring stuff when I drop it, of course, anything from your newspapers to your magazines to your junk mail to any piece of paper, you get even your receipts. I will say if it's smaller than your palm, it's probably gonna fall through the cracks and we're probably gonna sweep it up and put it as trash. So if you wrote a note to your friend, I use this in high school, you're probably not writing notes to your friends and tearing them up, but if you have a piece of paper and you tore it up really small, maybe it was your old taxes or something, and it's this big, and you put that in a recycling bin, it's going everywhere. So you can compost that just fine, but we want things to be that you give us as far as paper goes to be palm size or larger. It's just helpful for us to actually be able to recycle it. So even things like your laundry detergent boxes, your egg cartons, all those are fine to recycle. So that's our cardboard and paper area. We also take your metals, could be foil, could be pipe plates, could be soup cans, corn cans, et cetera. So those are great to recycle. And yes, we are a redemption state, which is beautiful, but maybe you don't have a place to put your bottles and cans and stuff when you're out and about or just one day or every day of your life, whatever. We also take your redemption stuff. You don't get paid for it. You don't get that five or 15 cents back. We do take it and recycle it beautifully. If you do redeem your stuff, great. Just know it doesn't come to us. It goes to clink or other places and is recycled a little more efficiently because we take everything and they just take the glass and the plastic and the aluminum, but that's another fun process. Clink is a really fun place to tour. I don't know if they give public tours, but it is pretty cool to go to if they do. So just know that we do take your cans and bottles and things if you're not able to return for the deposit. We also take your glass containers. So it could have some residue in there. I don't know if you can really see it, but you might see some splotches or stuff in there. I purposely did not clean this out because a little residue is totally acceptable. I also brought my handy-dandy peanut butter jar just to show you too. Again, whether it's glass or plastic, I don't think they make metal containers like this, but it's got some residue that is acceptable. We need anything you go us to be emptied out, but it does not have to be pristine clean. So don't scrub it. Don't put it through the dishwasher. Don't waste all your water washing it. If you want to give it a little rinse, great. Lids on, lids off. Lids on or off when it comes to glass, when it comes to plastic, lids stay on. So plastic on plastic, and it's your choice whether you want to do metal on glass. If you do, fine. If you don't, you can pop both of these in there, but the reason we want plastic to stay on plastic is this guy right here is never going to be recyclable by itself. But like this, it is. So same media can stay on different media should be separate. The lesson will get lost in this system. Yep, but again, it's your choice. If you want to keep metal on glass, you can do that. Because I'll show you later, we actually smash up your glass and we remove the tops with a metal magnet. So it does get removed, but whereas the plastic would not get removed. So plastic stays on plastic. That is the bottom line. You remember nothing else from tonight. Actually, I hope you remember a lot of other things from tonight. So as far as plastic goes, it's got to be a rigid container labeled one, two, three, four, five, six or seven. We're incredibly lucky that we take one through seven. A lot of towns, I get a lot of calls all the time that say, oh, my town only does number two or my town doesn't recycle plastic at all. I'm like, oh, that's terrible. We take one, two, three, four, five, six and seven, which is great. But again, it has to be a container of some kind. We don't want your cellophane. We don't want your pen caps. We don't want those teeny tiny random pieces of plastic. We don't want your hangers, plastic or metal. We don't even want your styrofoam. Yes, it's plastic. Oftentimes it has a number one through six on it. But if you pick up one of my placards in the back, it says plastics one through seven. That's a container that's rigid except styrofoam. Anybody see that whenever they looked at their card? So styrofoam, this is why. It's too lightweight. There's no market for it anywhere close by. So imagine amassing enough styrofoam, maybe enough to fill up half this room, pop that on a semi truck, drive it down to New Jersey, because that's one of the closest places that recycles styrofoam. You're gonna waste all your gas. You're gonna have to pay that person to drive down there and you're not gonna be able to recoup anywhere close to the amount that you would get paid for that styrofoam. So that we say there's no market for it. So if you happen to use styrofoam, it goes in the trash. Try and reduce your use. But of course, we get a new microwave, a new TV, a new bathroom vanity. It's got styrofoam around it. That's always gonna be trash. We cannot recycle your styrofoam. I wish that we could, we just can't. So your plastic has to be a rigid container labeled one, two, three, four, five, six, or seven. Now, do we have multiple bins or one bin? Oh, okay. Good. On those containers that often have paper stuck to them, is it okay? We don't care about paper. Yeah, that is totally fine because this, I'll just pick up this coffee mate stuff I got out of the recycling, it's got work. It's great example. It's got like a plastic lining on it. Or some things of course have paper lining on it. You think even your cans have paper labels on them. So when it comes to plastic, everything is chipped up and that stuff is just washed away and disposed of. Yeah, great question. Yes? Give me a stupid question, but no stupid question. What are the containers says paper? Do I assume that means cardboard too? That's the key question. Yeah, so if it, if it, where are you? Where do you live? In Cumberland, in the Bakery Tower. Okay. It depends on what your building is doing. So if you don't have curbside pickup from the city or you don't have a drop off location with the city or town that you live in and your, your condo association or your apartment is doing something special, I can't speak to that exactly. But definitely contact them and say, hey, you know, I know this says paper. You know, what else can I put in there? And if they just say it's only paper, then that's only paper because paper and cardboard are different. They have two different commodity prices. They're sorted in different ways, which I'll show you how they're sorted in a few minutes. But if it says one thing, I would just check in and don't, don't assume. Cause when you assume, we have problems. Yeah, of course. And of course there's no stupid questions. Questions are my favorite. So do we have one bin for everything or do we have five different bins for our types of materials? One. So we have one bin. We moved to single sort in 2007 or so. Before that it was source separations. So cardboard went here, paper went here, aluminum went here, steel and tin, ferrous stuff went here and so on. So that was very much cleaner, much more straightforward. Know what we call contamination or junk in the recycling. But it also was a much less participation. When we moved to single sort, participation exploded. So we have more stuff getting recycled, which is great. And I know it sounds simplistic, but all we have to do is really think about what we're putting in the bin and it works perfectly. If we say, oh, well I just wanna put everything that I wanna put in there and someone else will deal with it, that's where the problems come in. And unfortunately that's where the money comes in too. When we recycle wrong as a town, as a complex apartment complex, as a state, as anything, it actually costs a lot more money. Hazika main unfortunately has to look at all the trucks that dump out, next one here. So we look at the trucks as they're dumping no matter where they come from. There's a person standing right here. When that truck drives forward a little bit, they walk around and they say okay, I see this and this and this and this and this and they write it down on a ticket. I'll actually show you what we've seen written down kind of after we talk about recycling. And it's fascinating and shocking and gross and weird and like, huh, why would someone recycle their suitcase? Why would someone put their pillow in the recycling bin? So we get a lot of stuff and that's where the fees come in. So if we get a lot of junk, then we have to charge that town more money. We don't wanna do that. The town certainly doesn't wanna do that. But where do you think that extra money comes out of? Your taxes. So if we recycle right, it is amazing. We save money. We recycle more. Things actually work. If we recycle wrong, machines break, humans get hurt. We have to charge money. A lot of the recycling, not a lot, but some recycling has to get pushed towards the trash building because if there's more than 25% of this recycling as trash, we have to pick it up and bring it down to the trash building because again, that's one out of every four items. It's junk. We can't take that. We can't handle that in our facility. So it's really important to make sure we know what goes where. But the process of recycling is you recycle at home or at work or you bring it to the transfer station, et cetera, it goes in your bins, then goes on a truck. Truck picks it up, dumps it off inside our building. Again, we're right around the corner from the Portland airport, right across the highway from Unum. Come, you know, wave high next time you drive by. Maybe you drop your dog off. It can't bow out. Anybody? We're right there. And then the front-loader's job is to take it from there. Once it's on the floor, it's our job to deal with it. Then we push it up onto a conveyor belt that conveyor belt moves through the building. From here to the last item that's sorted, which I'll tell you right now is number three through seven plastic. Anyone want to guess how long that takes? More than 20 seconds, good guess. Way less than an hour. Somewhere in between, 20 seconds to an hour. Less than five minutes, less than 10 minutes. Three minutes or less. Three minutes or less. So I'm hoping the sound is not crazy loud on here. I'm gonna turn it down right away just to make sure. Cause sometimes this can be quite noisy. So here's our front-loader, here's our big pile of stuff. You can easily see the cardboard but of course the paper plastic metal lessons and is all in there. Unfortunately, I do see some contamination right away. That's that squishy plastic here. But what he is doing is he's pushing it up onto the conveyor belt. The conveyor belt then moves it through, goes through this thing called a drum feeder, which is very, very, very slowly, to the other way, slowly separates things. So say the cardboard box got stuck to something else. So that slowly separates things out and it also meters it out a little bit at a time instead of giant humps at a time going up the hill this way. There is a person standing right about here. That person's job is to pull out the trash. They're pulling out propane tanks that will and can and have exploded in our facilities. They're pulling out giant bags of trash that people put in their recycling bin. They're pulling out garden hoses. I once was on a tour with some people and I saw the guys get, there's one guy there and he called over two more guys and all three of them hefted this enormous like raft of spirally curly tanglers. I don't have a better word for it but it was everything from garden hoses to chains to tubing to, I don't even know where all this stuff came from but it took three men to put it down into the trash chute. So we don't want everything, we just want the right things. Once it pushes past that human, there are rubber stars that are taken out the cardboard and the paper. So when I say rubber star, I really mean a rubber star. These things here are turning on axles. The ones here are about this big. I don't bring one in for maybe obvious reasons of they're too big and heavy but I brought you these paper sorting star. They're really fun. I'll pass this guy around. Two hands if you'd like it, it's a little heavier. So you might notice that the large stuff goes up and over. He falls down here and goes downstairs to be squished together in the baler. We're about to see a bag of trash go right there. Is that yours? Anybody want to pass that to it? So no bags of trash, no bags of anything except shredded paper. The only bag, the only, only, only, only, only bag we take is a clear plastic bag with shredded paper in it. We'll take your shredded paper all day long but it has to be in a player plastic bag. Otherwise it's tin-setting, it goes everywhere. If it's in a black bag, we think it's trash, we throw it away. We would rather it's in a plastic bag because if we see that paper bag and we see that it's full of stuff, we don't say, ooh, what's in here? We say, ooh, trash. So moving forward, if you're able to put it and it could be a produce bag, it could be a bread bag, it could be any sort of bag that you can see through. It just has to be something we can see in. And we can say, ooh, look, paper. Throw it downstairs with the cardboard guy, puts it with the paper, opens it up and it goes in with the paper. So it's starting to pass them around right now. There's 300 of those and they're on two hills like this. They're like that. We're looking at the second hill. You see how the paper is kind of moving up the hill and it falls over. Same thing happens above. Glass metal and plastic falls through and goes on a magnet over here, which we'll talk about in a second. But here's our paper falling down, going through a room, whereas everything else just came this way through another, the same room on a different belt, and humans are in there picking out any trash by hand. Here's some trash that slipped through the cracks. What color was that star that I was pathing around? What color do you see here? It's stuck, it's stuck. When junk gets stuck in what we call the stars, can glass metal and plastic fall through the way it should? So it all goes with the paper. So the paper gets contaminated or full of junk, full of trash and then we can't sell it. We want the good stuff. We don't want your plastic bags. We don't want your shoelaces. We don't want your chains. We don't want your garden hoses. We don't want, we call the tanglers. We even get jeans and beautiful flannel shirts. But guess what? We have to stop the machine and lock it in place and then someone has to go and pick it out. I'll pass these two pictures around. Hang on, please. Two pictures, this is a still of the stars. They have been stopped. You can even see some beautiful tinsel from maybe a Christmas tree right there. They got stuck. The second picture is a big pile of stuff that was taken out of the stars that then will be taken to the trash building. So instead of you or Joe Schmoe putting the stuff in the trash bin first, it came to us, it got stuck. Humans had to pick it out using their hands. Of course they've got gloves and hats and everything, but with box cutters and scissors and things, it's time consuming so it's a loss of productivity for us, it's a loss of money for us. And it's not fun, it's not safe for whoever has to do that. So that's what these two pictures are. Question? I have a question. I live in an apartment that we have here in Portland. And the sorting is not really sorting. I don't know if I'm making sense. Yep, so sometimes people have trouble sorting. So the 10th deal, I'll go down to the cash and see, oh, there's a big pile of trash sitting right there. And well, I'm not the trash girl or the trash person. So it's hard to start a trend because there's 43 people that live in my building. So you're not just talking about one person. Right, that's gonna be a lot of people. Who owns the building or who runs the building? Port property management or a different one? Property management is our, it's more over, so the office is over by the home. Okay, so that happens a lot. Maybe some people are really good at recycling and some people just don't care or they don't know. EcoMain, we offer, just like this program, we offer free education to help people understand the what's, the where's, the why's and the how's. We have free stuff on our website. If you need a card, I'm very happy to provide you with this. What I have done is I have posted in our mail room, trash, not trash, and have also posted in the trash room. And you go in and you're throwing your trash away and you see something that is in the trash, trash pile that should be the recycling pile or vice versa. Yeah, so education and signage is really helpful. I'm really happy to talk to you more afterwards to help you do that. Well, I guess even if you talk to me, maybe I can give you some of these emails and then they can, yeah. Sure, let's talk after. So any trash that comes to us has to be pulled out by a human. There's not one machine or 100 machines that take out trash. So it's a human's job with their gloves and their hats and their masks and everything. So that's not a fun thing for them to have to do. So it's remember, it's our job at home to do the right thing. And it's their job at home to help make sure that we've done the right thing. So when we have 400,000 customers say, oh, well, someone else will take care of it, can they take care of all 400,000 of us? No, maybe like 10 or 200 of us were doing that. But they just, we, our building can't handle the contamination. So those placards, the signs that you don't card in the back, incredibly helpful. We have tons of things you can print off online too. We can also help you customize something for your building. We help customize stuff for schools and businesses. So we wanna make sure that you've got what you need. And of course, it's all free. So if you need a future presentation at a business or it's out of school or you just need someone to get their bum kicked in the rear to get things going, definitely approach me for a card later and we'd be really happy to help with that. Short. My office is in a building that has lots and lots of offices in it. And it's not, maybe this is, as I'm asking this, maybe I can't be answered, but what is the responsibility of a business or like a landlord to ensuring that their tenants are, in this case, business tenants are recycling? It really depends. The landlord can provide the trash and the recycling. If they're getting too many fees, as far as the recycling goes, they can pull that without any notice. So it behooves the business folks to do the right thing. That's where the education and the signage comes in. Cause I've seen a lot of dumpsters that is recycling, but there's no recycling signage on it. And someone says, oh, well people know. And it's like, well, do they know? So making sure the signage is key and the education is key. And you can't just tell someone something once, right? You gotta say yearly or over and over again, hey, this is what goes here and this is what goes there. So lunch and learns are great, but signage and education are huge things. In our case, if it's not provided by the landlord, then we have to manage our recycling. And there were bins in the city, but we don't know where they've gone. They were at one parking lot. Yeah, so the city has to provide recycling to tenants, but they don't have to, or residents, but they don't have to do it for businesses. So it's basically a business's job to get the recycling contract and hauler. And then that happens. So as possible, that business just stopped recycling or moved their recycling bins or got recycling bins inside. What about those big trailer things that used to be in... What we call the silver bullets, the things with the sign or the doors. Some of them are painted really prettily and some are just kind of... So what happened was, have we heard of tragedy in the commons? Where something is there for everybody's good and it gets spoiled so it gets taken away? That's what happened. Those bins were there for everybody. They've been taken out of Falmouth. They've been taken out of Cape Elizabeth. They've been taken out of Portland, lots of different places. So I wish that they were all still there, but the town could not incur the fees of people dumping off their toasters and their vacuum cleaners and their pillows and their couches and their old refrigerators and their dog poo. And I've, you know, asked me what I've seen and I'll give you a long list. So there's nothing like that for Portland then? There's nothing like that for Portland except Riverside recycling at the transfer station. It's not exactly monitored, but it's open from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday. And if you're a Portland resident or if you're even from somewhere else, if you bring the right stuff there, they accept it. All you have to do is say, hey, I'm dropping off recycling. They'll put you up to the right. You drop it off in another silver bullet. They have two there and then you go on your merry way. But we all need to take care of the bins that we are provided, whether it's at our home or the silver bullets, because otherwise they're gonna go away. And that's not an eco-main thing. It's a town or a city thing. Yes, thank you for being patient. I've been to Hawaii and have you heard of the Greatness in the Garbage Patch? Yes, I have, unfortunately. Yeah, I think that is, yeah. So I went to a beach in Hawaii and with an organization, we picked up a bunch of trash. Good for you. It's very sad what you see out there. I would agree with you. So how do we stop that from happening? What can we do at home? We have to do more recycling than throwing things away. And in Hawaii, they had, when we went there, they said reuse, recycle, and do more things, but also refuse, try to buy it at less cost. Well, I'm gonna give you a high five from way up here. Ready? Pew! So yes, exactly, refuse. And of course, reduce, reuse, recycle, and compost. So that stuff doesn't get into the ocean or it doesn't get onto the land, which then goes in the ocean. Even putting things down storm drains. That goes to a body of water. So we have to think about where stuff is going. But if you put it in the recycling bin and then it gets blown away on trash day, go pick it up, please. I know it's a bummer that you have to go pick up stuff, but it's not, unfortunately, the city picker uppers. They're not gonna do it. So if you can pick up litter, always try and do that. Definitely wash your hands after. The stuff at Riverside Recycling, go to England? The recycling stuff goes to us. Yeah, they don't take household trash. So that's, you know, their trash doesn't come to us. They've got a lot of different sources of, this goes here and this goes here and this goes here. So most of it doesn't stay at Riverside Recycling. A lot of it goes out, especially their hazardous waste and they're painted all that. But yes, we get their recycling. Come straight to us. There's no way, because I also have Riverside in the garden. And so I assume that all of them goes to the Hatch Hill dump. There's no way to... If you're in Gardner, don't... There's no way to get it to go to Eco-Mainsby, Incinerated, etc. If Gardner signs up with us. So talk to your town council members and the folks who are in charge of the trash contracts. And we will be there in a New York minute to bid on it and give you our prices. And if... It's not on the town office, not to Riverside. Right. Yeah, Riverside has nothing to do with deciding. They just take stuff. So we're gonna have to speed up a little bit because I love these questions, but I do want to keep telling you what's going on with your stuff. So your metal... So we have two types of metals that we typically use in a day or a week or a month. It's ferrous and nonferrous. Ferrous means it has an attraction quality to it. It's got iron or steel into it. And that can be picked up by a magnet. So anything like your scythe cans, corn cans, beans cans, et cetera, anything that can be grabbed, be grabbed by the magnet and brought over here and thrown into bed. It's grabbed, thrown, grabbed, thrown, grabbed, thrown. That is anything that can be attacked by a magnet. If you want to do a climate science experiment tonight, go to your refrigerator, pull a magnet off and try to stick it to a aluminum foil. It'll stick to your soup can, but it will not stick to your aluminum foil. What we have to do here is we have our reverse eddy current magnet under the belt and that has a repelling force like this. So it is pushing. It's pushing stuff up and over. Everything else falls down and goes this way. So it's a opposite force instead of a pulling force. This is pretty cool. So two different types of metals taken out with two different types of magnets. Next up we have glass. We crush your glass, we break it and then crush it with, instead of rubber stars, we've got metal stars in a kind of a room. I don't have a video of it because there's glass flying everywhere and breaking and it's not really conducive to having a video camera in there. So we crush your glass and then it can be used in different types of things like countertops and potholes and even underneath new buildings. So instead of buying sand or gravel, people can pick up our glass and use it as a filler. So I'll pass this guy around again. This is your example of glass countertops. So how about that paper wrapper on my glass can and butter jar? That will come off. So the glass wrapper on the peanut butter jar, et cetera, will come off and it will, it's not a problem at all. Yeah, don't worry about taking off any wrapping or anything like that. It's not a problem. You shouldn't be putting aluminum foil at all in there. Aluminum foil is totally fine to go in. Yep, totally fine to go in. It can be clean-ish, clean-ish. So mostly clean, a little bit of dirty, totally fine. Aluminum foil, pi plates, et cetera, totally fine. This one here has taken out your plastics. I'll most likely play this video again because it's my favorite and it's super cool. But has anyone seen anything flying upwards? That is our machine at work. This is what we call an optical sorter. What does optical refer to? So it's reading the chemical makeup of all the things that go underneath it. This machine, we've set it to read number one plastic. Things like your berry containers, your lettuce containers, your number one, you know, even your pollen spring water bottles, your number one plastics. So this machine sees all this stuff go underneath it and can only see number one. Can't see anything else, so it goes like this. And your number two, number three, number four, number five, number six, number seven goes down and is sorted by hand. So this doesn't, it just falls down and goes on a different conveyor belt. So let's watch that again. So I'm sorry, you're saying it actually reads the number on the container? Reads the material, doesn't read the number, reads, it sees through it and it says this is made out of PET. This is made out of not PET. I don't see it. So I just look for things flying upwards. Isn't that incredible? It'd be great if we had more than one but it's a quarter of a million dollars so we have one machine. Did I mention that eco-main is non-profit? Which is something that I love about it. I love working for a non-profit because we're focused on the right thing to do, not how much money we can make off of it. So humans have been sorted out to number two, three, four, five, six and seven into three more bins. I remember this is the last thing that sorted from way over here to where it was pushed on the belt to all the way around here, three minutes or less. Super quick process. So again, we want the good stuff in there because the machines all work great. The humans don't get hurt. We don't have to get in there and cut anything out. The humans don't have to pick out as much stuff because inevitably they're gonna miss a lot of it if there's too much in there. Again, back to the numbers. So at this point, are they actually reading numbers? They're recognizing material. Yeah, so whenever they come on board with us, whether it's a temp or a full-time union person, they're trained to know what goes in each bin. Just by the look of it. By the look of it, yep. Yeah, and I mean, if you're like me, I've been in this business for three and a half years, but if you study and if you think about it and if you're conscious of the types of things you're using, you'll know. I mean, if it's something that you devote time to, so these friends, it's their job to say, is this a number three, is it a number two, is it a number seven? They know, so they've got a good handle on it. Now, if we separate everything and hold on to it, is it recycling or hoarding? So we want to send it off, right? So we, so we bail it and then we send it away. So here's our giant baler. It goes way up high and we wrap it with wire. We use around two miles of wire every day to bail everything. It's giving you an idea of how much stuff we're bailing. And the first one pushes, or the second one pushes off the first one, the third one pushes off the second and so on, so things are made and pushed out. And then Richard here, or Jeremy, or Goren, or Charlie, whoever's on the line here that day, it has to inspect it. Because we want to send off only good stuff. We don't want to send off junk. So we look it over and we only look at the outside because of course we don't have X3Is. That's not something we're equipped with. So if we see a little bit on the outside, we pull it out and send it on its way. If we see a lot on the outside, we actually pick it up, bring it around front and send it through again. So we're only sending out quality. Because if we sent off junk and it was rejected, we would have to pay for it to come back. And you know, one, that's not good business. We want people to like our stuff and two, that's wasting money. So we just picked off a couple things and he can either put it in a pile outside if it's something that's able to stay outside, metal or plastics, or he puts it right on a truck with the use of our ramp. And so our cardboard tends to go to New York or Massachusetts. Our metals tend to go to Pennsylvania. Our plastics tend to go to Alabama or Michigan. Our glass stays right here in the Portland area, it's reused by being picked up for potholes or countertops or Shaw brothers or whoever. Construction companies using it as filler under new buildings. Our paper is the only thing it used to go out of the country. So when China closed their doors in 2017 or so to say no more plastics, no more paper, well we had a problem with the paper aspect but not the plastics. Cause we've never sent our plastic out of the country, which is fantastic. Paper has gone to Virginia recently. We have been sending it a little bit out of the country a little bit recently too to find a buyer but we're committed to keeping it inside the country. So as soon as those markets improve, we're gonna keep it in the country. So that's where your stuff goes and of course if we put the right stuff and the right bins, we can make new stuff. If we put the wrong stuff in, lots of problems ensue. Here's a fun playground in South Portland made out of your old milk jugs, soup cans and aluminum type products. Here's an example of the wood made from your milk jugs. So that is not wood wood. It is actually plastic lumber made of milk jugs which actually made this whole playground which is incredible. Yes. Can you guys notice it? You don't have to notice it. It feels a little different than wood and it doesn't splinter, it doesn't get eaten by bugs and it is a little heavier cause it's more dense but I mean it's a super fun playground. If you haven't been there, go to scratch bakery, bring your dog, go to town on this thing. There are companies who make shoes out of plastic water bottles, companies that make toys out of milk jugs, companies that make sunglasses out of recycled product, shirts and other clothing out of recycled product, even water bottles, even bicycles. This company is out in Oregon. They're going for a 100% recycled product bicycle. They're almost there which is pretty cool. It's called the Recycle, get it? And then my personal favorite, recycled paper toilet paper. Anybody use that at home? Why cut down trees when you could use recycled material? I love it. Where do you get it? Target, Hannaford, lots of places have it these days. Rennies, there you go. So many places. Now, yes. What about paper towels? Paper towels are compostable but not recyclable. The fibers that make up a paper towel are too short, that's why they're nice and soft and whenever you pulp up paper to make new paper, it kind of turns in a mush so you can't turn it into something else. So your napkins, paper towels, tissues, especially toilet paper, don't put that in the recycling bin. You can compost your napkins and paper towels and even your tissues, if it gets hot enough, say in an industrial complex, like garbage to gardener, we compost it. You ready for the fun slides? Yes. We don't have tape, I think you send a package and you put that tape on it. Don't worry about the tape, because when everything's pulped up, that tape is kind of skimmed away just like the plastic envelopes and junk mail. Don't worry about it, it gets skimmed all the way. Not a problem. All right, friends, check out these slides. We'll come back to you in just a second. So there are three slides here. We might look at one, we might look at all three. We'll just see. This is a random sampling. This was back in May of last year. A random sampling of we have a huge spreadsheet of every single truck that comes in from every town that we service, from every kind of truck, from a packer truck, to a silver bullet, to curbside, to everything. We track it all. We know what's in there. We see it. Nothing slips by us. So the kinds of things that we're getting get lots of full bags of stuff. It could be full bags of recycling, could be full bags of trash, could be full bags of leaves. If it's a full bag, we count it. A lot of empty bags. Some people empty out their recycling in the bins and then throw their bag in. No, thanks, we don't want that either. We also just don't want your bags to recycle. Yes, they're made of plastic. No, we can't take it. Because one, they're not rigid, they squish. Two, they get stuck in our machines. Three, there's no market for us to sell them to. So we just can't take them. But Hannaford's, Shaw's, Walmart, Target, Whole Foods, lots of places, can. PlasticFilmRecycling.org is your new best friend. But then there's stuff like plastic straps, record player, styrofoam, padded envelopes, clothes hamper, scraps of metal. That can be very scary. We have gotten, I think it was two months in a row, we got long pieces of metal that slipped by us, the people working to pick out stuff. And it got stuck in the stars, and it actually ended up cutting a conveyor belt in half. Anyone wanna guess how much a conveyor belt costs? $10,000, so we ended up losing $20,000 out of those two months in a row. So don't give us the bad stuff, please. Egg crate, rubber gloves, ooh, and creepy, no thank you, a green wig. Huh, that's fun. VHS tapes, wax boxes, a basketball, where else could a basketball have gone? Someone else who wanted it. We got a car seat. We've got, you know, this actually looks a little bit better, obviously, because the less writing you see, the better it is. A back brace, hmm? I'm sure that could have been better. We're talking about batteries. Yeah, batteries. So if you're the regular remote control or flashlight type batteries, AAAAA, Ecomane can take them in the trash. We're permitted to be able to take those in trash. If they are like lithium-ion batteries, anything from your computer batteries to your controllable cars and drones and things, anything that you can recharge, lithium-ion batteries have, for lack of a better word, goo inside them, where if they get broken open, you know, they're hit by our front loader or they fall off the truck or something like that, they break open, actually spontaneously erupt into fire with the mix of oxygen, naturally. If you wanna see a not so fun video, go on YouTube and search Ecomane Fire. We record things and then put them on YouTube to be an education thing for you. So Home Depot and Lowe's are the types of stores you can take your lithium-ion batteries back to, as well as what I like to call swirly light bulbs. You know what I mean? When I say swirly light bulbs, those have mercury inside them. Those cannot and will not, should not go in your trash can either. So lithium-ion batteries and mercury-containing light bulbs, even mercury-containing thermostats. What am I hearing with batteries? Those can go at Lowe's and Home Depot as well. We don't want those either. Great question. And then one more picture for you. You know, just wanted to give you another example. This is December of last year. We don't have January input yet, otherwise I would have had the most up-to-date numbers, but we don't have those yet. But you know, curtains, shrink wrap, foam packaging, wire hangers, of course those around the holidays. So we've got your bags and ribbons. You know, we get Christmas trees and wreaths and Christmas lights and I'm sure we've gotten all kinds of stuff that we just, we don't want. What about wrapping paper, like the tin? If you can rip it, we can take it, but if it's super glittery or medley, we don't want it. With so many people shopping online, I see a lot of shipping envelopes, bubble packing. Is there a market for that, or do you foresee a market that's open? If it's paper and plastic, it's trash because there's just no way to separate that. If it's plastic and plastic, like Amazon, those can go back to the grocery stores with your grocery bags and stuff. Please cut the label off because they don't really want that paper on there and it just makes their life a lot easier. But those plastic on plastic bubble wrap containers or packages can go back to grocery stores. You know, I'm fancying this now, I think. Is there any thought into the fact that when they started charging for the trash bags, people started putting more inappropriate stuff into the recycling business and they gave those trash bags even for your cheaper. People would be more likely to not put a child seat in a trash bag instead of in a... Yeah, great question. So if you didn't hear, she's saying, did we see a rise in contamination when, say, City of Portland or other places started charging for trash bags? So pay is your throw, it's what we call that program. There's definitely a small amount of correlation but we don't see a huge amount of correlation. There's definitely probably some illegal dumping at the drop-off sites, but not so much in the curbside bin so we don't see a huge correlation there. But a little-known fact, I don't know if you know this, but when you have pay as you throw, you actually pay less in taxes because then you're not subsidizing everyone else's trash habit. So say you're the kind of person who makes one bag of trash per week or every two weeks or maybe two bags of trash. Well, you're only paying for that one or two bags of trash, but if you're someone who makes 10 bags of trash, if you have pay as you throw, Joe Schmo's gonna pay for 10 bags, you're gonna pay for one or two bags, but if you're on equal footing and you don't have pay as you throw, you're basically paying for their trash. So you're paying less. Yes, you're paying upfront. You have to get your wallet out at the store and say, okay, here's $15 for 10 bags or whatever it might be, but you are paying less overall, which is not everyone gets that and I think it's huge because it's harder to pay right here than in your taxes because you don't always see it in your taxes. A lot of time, containers, you get the grocery store, they put them together for convenience, paper and plastic, like there'll be a paper, let's say for example, almond milk, I don't have a plastic container to pour it from, is that all plastic? Well, the container, so if it's combined on a cardboard thing, just put it all in the recycling bin. If you're able to take the top off and throw that away, great. But if you don't, when this thing gets pulped up, that's thrown out. So it's also pulped up with it and it floats at a different density than the paper. The majority is paper then. Yeah, that's definitely recyclable. Yeah, just make sure it's empty. One of the ones that there's, you see there's a point they sell coffee containers, which are all paper except for plastic. Trash. Plastic bag or sorry, coffee bags, whether it's foily looking, papery looking, they're always gonna be trash, which is a real bummer. Even if they look metal, they're just honestly plastic that looks like metal. So your coffee bags are unfortunately trash. But coffee by design down on Diamond Street, you can fill up your own containers, just saying. Tandem coffee will take their coffee bags back when they recycle. Super, that's great. So if there's a take back program of any kind, yes, I love it. TerraCycle also, you can mail back stuff. There is a higher carbon footprint with that and there is environmental impact to that. So if you want to do that, great. But it does cost a lot of money. Go-go refill in South Portland. Go-go refill in South Portland. Has anyone been there yet? Super fun place. You can fill up all kinds of stuff and you use less packing. They take the TerraCycle. Oh, beautiful. That's really, really great. So everyone go check out Go-go refill tomorrow. Yes, sir. Is there a difference between solid and recycling? I would say it's definitely different. So salvage could be old hubcaps and you turn it into something new. We don't take hubcaps to recycle at our building. So there's definitely different sources and different streams. It's reusing for sure, but it's a different connotation, a different kind of end material, for sure. Great question. Yes. This is the main reason I'm here. People are talking about, like what, you know, after that banger pants were, they put everything in one bin and I don't trust that it's a good idea, but I wanted to get a professional opinion. We have a lot of opinions on that. So Fiberite, I think they've now changed their name and unfortunately I can't remember what that name is. They're doing good things. They are taking material, but they recently had a propane tank that derailed them for a couple of days. So when something as small as that happens and then they have to divert everything to the landfill, that's not very productive. So I think they're gonna be great, but we like our model. Unfortunately, I gotta keep going. So if you can compost, please do. I will answer your question afterwards. I promise you, but if you can compost, please do because we take your trash and we burn it. Your trash comes to us no matter what color bag it's in. It comes to this beautiful building right here, comes in this room, backs up, goes into this giant trash bunker, beautiful trash room. And then a claw picks it up, puts it into the fire, burns for four hours, cools off for four hours, and then goes to the landfill where it sits there forever. But instead of this sitting there forever, this sits there forever. This creates methane, this creates no methane, and it's also 10% of its original size and volume. That's the short story. Here's the long story. You and I make trash, goes on a truck, gets dumped off, claw picks it up, puts it into the fire, burns for four hours, cools for four hours, goes on a conveyor belt right before it hits the truck. There's a super fun giant drum magnet that pulls out anything ferrous. Throws it into a bin kind of on the other side of the truck over here, and then the ash goes into the truck. About 300 trucks come into us, about six to 10 leave per 24 hour period. So again, vast reduction in size and volume. Regular trash is super bulky, ash is super compact. That's one thing we're creating, ash. Next thing we're creating, there's two walls here, but there's actually two fires. So there's four walls inside those walls. There's pipes, they'll pass us around, very heavy. There's pipes, ballpark two miles in each wall or in each system with each fire, filled with purified water. The water is then heated by the heat from the fire from the trash. So we're using the heat from the trash and what happens to water when it gets heated up? Steam is created, it evaporates, steam is created. Then we push that through a steam turbine. The big fan type thing, big turbine. This is not really productive or helpful for us. Can I borrow your arm just for fun? Just hold it out, since you've been on a tour. She's the generator. What does a generator do? Next, let's hear a story. If anyone's power has ever gone out and they have a generator, they're super pumped about it. So she's a generator, I'm the steam and the turbine. Not very helpful, I'm gonna move you. What is she doing? Making energy. I'm not really doing much good, except I'm moving her. So she's the one making the electricity. So we power our entire trash building, our entire recycling building and our super fun two electric cars that we take to programs. Mine's actually parked up in around the corner right now. And we use between 10 and 15% of the electricity that we make total. 85 to 90% goes to the grid and is used by maybe some of you. It's 15,000 homes worth of electricity. So I can't say it's these 15,000 homes, but that's how much it's combined worth. So it's pretty cool. So we're making ash electricity and then anytime you burn anything from a pile of leaves in your backyard to a big old pile of trash, we're gonna make pollution. So we treat it one, two, three, four different ways. Treat it, sorry, we test it here 24 hours a day before it leaves a stack. When it leaves a stack, we're constantly monitoring it and it's always 96% water vapor with a little bit of other. So we are permitted and allowed to emit more than we do. So for example, last year, we could have emitted 25 pounds of mercury. That was our set limit from the EPA and the DEP. We did five. So we're always making sure that we're well below limits because we wanna make sure we're good and clean for the environment. Since we're a nonprofit, we can focus on pollution controls and not how much money are we saving by doing as little as possible. So here, we're spraying in something called urea to take out nitrogen oxides, moves through to what we call the reactor. Down here, we're taking out the mercury and dioxin furans with activated carbon. Here, we're taking out our sulfur dioxide and other acidic gases using lime flurry, I think back to chemistry class, acid plus base in the right amounts. What are the pluses? Neutralizes. So it essentially goes from eh, terrible to okay, cool. It's safe to go outside. And then one more, our electrostatic precipitator. Super fun word if anyone wants to try it. Six different curtains that are charged that are pulling the particulates or things that we don't wanna breathe in. Particulates are the things that come out of the trucks spew the icky smoke and smog, comes out of volcanoes. And of course, when you burn stuff, comes out of stuff that gets burned. So we are capturing all that. Those curtains capture it. And then those curtains are knocked on or hit. Particulates fall down here, mercury, dioxin, furans that have been captured come down here, mixed together, go in the ash to go to the landfill, but it's all contained. I saw a hand. Okay. So here's just a couple quick pictures and videos about what I just talked about. That was our claw. So here's our fire burning away 24 hours a day, but there's two fires. So we're kind of doing double duty. Once a year, we shut down one boiler in the spring. We shut the other one down in the fall, completely clean it out. Make sure all the pipes are all set. Everything is all good. Cause this is not the kind of system that you say, they could probably go another year or two. We're going, we're making sure it's clean and set to go every single year. And of course we have lots of people who are working with us in our building. So if something does happen to go wrong, they're on it like that. So just a couple more pictures. What are some things we're making? Here's our ash. It's reduced by 90% and then put in the landfill. So of course we're using less space. Our metals magnet takes out anything metal. So say you throw away a mattress with some springs in it. The springs would get recycled cause you're probably not going to reach in there and pull out all the springs yourself. So we do have a way to take out the ferrous stuff. And then the ash goes to the landfill. We line it to the T, incredibly well with super thick plastic as well as lots of clay layers, sand layers and gravel layers. So it's not just that teeny tiny layer between the land and the ash. It's so many different layers. And we have no problems with what we call leachate which is dirty water getting into the groundwater. We have groundwater wells all around. You can actually see one here, one here. And there's quite a few more. You can see another one over here and here. So we're always testing the water both independently with us and the DEP and the EPA. We all kind of work together to say, how are we doing? Okay, we're doing good. And let's keep going with that. I'm just wondering if there's been any research being done into somehow reducing the ash. There is some research going on internally and I hope there's more going on. When I go to the schools I say, all right friends, you're going to be the scientists to grow up to figure this out because we need to do something with this. Not yet, because remember I was talking about how we pulled out the mercury, dioxin, ferrins and the particulates. Those make the ash what we call special waste. It's not hazardous waste but it's not something you want to go roll around in. So we're definitely doing experiments where we mix it with different levels of cement. Say 10 and 90% and 50 and 50% and 40 and 30. So that doesn't make sense math wise but you get the idea. And we leave it in a bucket and then the bucket gets rained on and snowed on and we test the water. So we're definitely doing tests but it's not a week long process it's years and years because we want to see if anything's leaching out. Do you have to mix in those precipitates out of the mercury? I don't think we have to but we choose to because otherwise it's hazardous waste and I don't think there's another good way for us to do that. I don't know if every waste energy facility does that but that's just what we do. If we just did only the non pollution stuff I still don't know if it would be 100% usable so I think we're doing the best that we can right now. So this is a typical landfill. This is a eco-man landfill. Which one would you rather live next to? This is Hatch Hill and what Bangor calls Trash Mountain. So this creates methane, has a lot of pests often has fires. I'm not saying Hatch Hill has fires but landfills in general has fires. Incredibly hard to contain and put out. So not great whereas eco-man we think we're doing a really good job. Yes we are burning things and then making pollution but then treating it. We're also avoiding the methane emissions. We're making electricity. We are recovering the metal and we're also saving a lot of emissions because our landfill is three miles away from our waste energy building. Places like New York where they actually truck or ship or train their trash to places like Ohio. So that's a big mess. We go three miles which is pretty fun. So again we make steam through the turbine. We make icky gross stuff but we fix it. Some moral of the story. We take a lot of trash, we turn it into a little bit of ash, make a lot of electricity and moral of this whole program hopefully you learned a little something about taking all the reusable stuff out of your trash, if you can take the food waste out of your trash we'll have overall a healthier environment. We'll use a lot less natural resources and if we do it right we save a lot of money. So that is my presentation and I will take all your questions. If you need to leave feel free to add stuff for that. Thank you. Yes ma'am. That was a few minutes late. Did you mention your app? I did not mention my app. So the Recyclopedia is a fun thing. We make a list and the list is great but we can't do that. And the list is great but we can't make a list long enough for every single thing you've ever thought of. So the Recyclopedia is an online database. Free download on your smartphone or you can find it online at eco-main.org. It's at the bottom of the do-don't card. It's got a little white square that says Recyclopedia in it and you can look up over 1200 items to say can I recycle my pen cap, my shoe, my dog poo, my cardboard box, my blank? And if it's not in there and you say suggest item then we can put it in there. So you help us grow which is pretty cool. Thank you for pointing that out. Yes. Well, I have a question. If somebody eats up needles and they throw it in a trash can or they throw it in recycling what is going to be you then? So needles are very scary for us in the recycling bin. We don't want them ever in the recycling bin. If you happen to have needles or sharps for any reason you can put those in a laundry detergent container or something else that's very rigid. We don't want them in your milk containers because these can and do break open along the way if they've got stuff inside them. So laundry detergent containers or something else that's really hard and then put the top on it, tape it when it's full and write sharps or needles on it and then put it in your trash. Don't put them in whole or by themselves. We want them inside something because inevitably someone's gonna pick up that trash bag out of your container and get hurt and we have no desire to see that happen. Thank you, sir. I'd like to see you burn batteries. Is there a better way for flashlight batteries? Unfortunately, there's no real take back program or recycling program here in Maine. Other states I hear California has outlawed them in trash but to send them all the way to California, I don't know. We are permitted to take them. I'm sure there's a better way just like there's a better way for multiple things but I think we do the best that we can but that's where we're at right now. I think there are great broken glass. We'd rather it be in the trash to put it in a bag of some kind to put it in the trash because say you have your spaghetti sauce jar and you knock it off the counter. We want that to be in the trash but say you have a chip in your pint glass or maybe something is broken in two. That can go in the recycling. What we're trying to do is minimize the danger to the people who work there because inevitably things are gonna get broken. Even if you drop your, try and have something at the bottom of your recycling bin when you drop things in but inevitably something's gonna break. We don't need you to go in and clean it out. We want to minimize the amount of scary situation. This is a great presentation but I'm very critical. So, I am. So, it honestly looks like quite a dangerous place to work, potential. What are you doing to protect your workers? They all have incredibly strong safety gloves, masks, goggles, hard hats, safety vests, incredible amounts of training. No one goes into our building and is let go without incredible amounts of training. We do yearly training. It's not bi-yearly. What is it when you do it twice a year? So, my annual? Anyway, twice a year training. So, we do a lot of training but then we also do a lot of education like this. So, I say no sharps, no broken glass, no saw blades, no this, no propane tanks, no that to try and keep them safe as well. So, it's a huge effort but if we're all ambivalent and we don't care what happens to people, that's when the problem happens. So, really caring about what happens inside our facility makes you think and also recycle and throw things away better. So, we're very focused on safety. It's actually in our mission statement of doing things safely. The little canisters that I even like backpacking so, are these considered hazardous waste? We can take your small propane or kerosene containers. The 20 pound ones that you say you have on your grill, we can't take those. We take them in your trash only. Never do we want your propane or kerosene or any type of gas containers in your recycling bin because they can and will explode but in recycle, sorry, in trash they're safe because inside the walls of where the fire is, things can explode in there safely. It actually helps knock off the ash off the side and it's helpful. So, no to 20 pound containers or big ones, yes to small ones in your trash. Please make sure they're empty. If they're full, actually had someone come up to me yesterday and say, hey, I've got two full kerosene containers. Can I throw them away? I'm like, well, can you give them away? Can someone take them? If they're full, they probably need to go to a hazard waste hazardous waste day if no one else can use them. So, can you take the receipts that you get from your stores or our stores? Papers find a recycle. Even the bins? Yeah, yeah, papers, paper, papers find a recycle. Yep, if it's something like a gum wrapper, that's trash. Can we take our plastic bags to Shaw's to recycle them? But there's no sign, it's not promoted. Can more be done to educate people and let them know they can do that? Yes, absolutely, I wish that the stores did more. I wish plastic film recycling did more. Every single program I talk to, we reach about 40,000 people a year. Everyone gets indoctrinated with that information. But you just going home and saying, hey, five friends, I just learned this tonight, then they spread it. So that's really helpful too. So word of mouth is huge. I wish that there was something that could be done in the stores. But if you'd like to contact the sales managers of the stores that you visit, that could be really helpful too. To say, this needs better signage, this needs this, this needs that. Because actually the stores benefit from you taking your bags there because they kind of get a credit back of look how much we recycled. So it's actually behooves them to take more of the right stuff in. So I would contact them, as well as share it far and wide yourself. I think we need to take about three more questions. Right. Are the stores not melting and re-making bags? The stores are not, they're sending them off. So for example, Hannaford's has an exclusive contract with Trex Decking, which is in either Virginia or West Virginia, I can never remember. Especially when I'm on the spot on stage. So they basically take them all to their shipping warehouse in Scarborough, South Portland. And then that gets sent to a more central location and then it goes down there. So the stores are not doing anything with them except collecting and sending them off. Two more. Sure. I think you can bring your own sheets or clothing. Sheets or clothing, maybe animal shelters, could use them, definitely call ahead. But Goodwill also takes things that are stained or ripped or things like that. And they can cut them up and make rags for both yards and auto body shops and things. So they will take stuff. They don't have recycling in here. There's a couple textile recycling places. There's apparel impact, which you have to kind of call them or email them to ask for their locations are. And there might be one or two others. But they're not like really well, okay, we recycle your clothing. So you kind of got to look for it. Just to clarify, I'm taking the information back to my local dump guys on stage. Yay. I have everyone have asked to give me a different answer. Regular paper parking with the plastic lid on your don't list it says cup lids. Cup lids no bottoms yes. We want your bottom, but we don't want your top. We don't want it on there at all because when you just take that lid, it's not a container. And it also acts like paper. If it's attached to your paper cup, we don't want plastic on paper. So it's contaminating the paper. And if you take it off, it's not something we want. So your lids are trash. And no, no, no, no. Is that all you need to clarify? Also no straws, no bamboo utensils, no bamboo or no chopsticks, no plastic utensils. Again, there's a lot of things that we can't take it. There's a lot of no, no, no, no, no, but there's thousands and thousands and thousands. Yes, yes, please give us that. So take that list home, share with your friends. There's more bags in the back. Only take one if you need one. If you'll use it, yay, take it. Tell all your friends about what you learned tonight so that they can help us stay clean and safe. Thank you.