All About Trash in Rhode Island

How the Heck Is This Recycled?

Plastic Bag Edition
Like a good environmentalist, you gather your avalanche of stretchy plastic — grocery, dry cleaning, newspaper, cereal, sandwich and produce bags, even bubble wrap; recycling is fun! — and deposit it at your nearest collection site at CVS, Job Lot and Dave’s, to name a few. The bags are collected by the RIRRC, baled together and sold to plastic film remanufacturers, where the bale is shredded down, melted and/or ground into pellets. At the remanufacturing facility, the bags will be made into new plastic film.

Mattress Edition
You’ve finally wrangled your old mattress out of the garage and off to a collection site in your community or to Ace Mattresses in West Warwick. But how is an innerspring or memory foam mattress resurrected? First, it is sliced open and the layers are separated by type. Foam padding is compressed and recycled into carpet or animal bed padding; fibers are also compressed and recycled into oil filters or other textile applications. Box springs are extracted for scrap metal recycling. Finally, wood frames are recycled into mulch or burned as an alternative fuel source.
Info via the Mattress Recycling Council, which developed RI’s mattress recycling program in 2016 — the third of its kind in the nation. To date, Rhode Islanders have recycled more than 334,000 mattresses. The MRC, an initiative of the International Sleep Products Association, lobbied for the state’s $16 fee on mattress and box spring sales to support the recycling initiative.

Toxic Waste Edition
You drop off household waste at one of several EcoDepots a month and then what? In partnership with Clean Earth, the RIRRC consolidates old latex paint to be remanufactured for industrial and commercial uses. Flammable and combustible substances — think: gasoline or propane — head to waste-to-energy facilities. And everything else is someone else’s problem; unrecyclable toxic household waste is sent out-of-state to special hazardous waste landfills. rirrc.org/ecodepot

On the web: Visit RIMonthly.com/cleanups for a list of nearby litter cleanup organizations where you can keep the trash we make out of local parks, rivers and the ocean.

Interior courtesy of the Independent Newspaper/Michael Derr; exterior courtesy of of Rose Hill Book Exchange/Laura Pointek.

The Story Behind the Rose Hill Book Shed

A bibliophile’s paradise would be dark, damp and a mystery in more ways than one. Oh, and it’d be chock`ablock full of free books. The book shed at the Rose Hill transfer station in Peace Dale is such a place. The building — concrete, no electricity, somehow cold and humid no matter the time of year — has housed community book donations for years. Before that, the books were stored in an actual shed, says retired town employee Bill McCusker, but even he can’t pinpoint when it all got started. A few volunteers keep tabs on the space, tidying up and emptying donation boxes, but they work behind the scenes and of their own volition. It’s as if everyone in South Kingstown and Narragansett just decided: books are always worth saving. Says McCusker, “A lot of good books don’t make it into the garbage because of that book exchange.” –C.N.

RIRRC/Instagram.

Ready, Set, Sort

Test your recycling know-how with “Ready, Set, Sort,” a new waste-sorting computer game from the RIRRC that’s fun for kids and weirdly addictive for adults. The best part? Unlike shoddy sorting in real life, “Ready, Set, Sort” doesn’t have consequences. Drag an item to the wrong bin — lidded coffee cups got us on level 5; those are trash-bound — and you can try again. Stick with it long enough and you can build your own fun park, complete with jumping gorillas, a giant Del’s cup, a princess castle and more. The park’s skyline is the best part, with fan faves like the Big Blue Bug, the Towers, the Superman building and more. And, bonus, you get a very special Certificate of Achievement at the end of all five rounds. rhodeislandresource.recycle.game –C.N.

RIRRC/instagram and Getty Images.

Trash Talk: Dumb Questions for a Recycling Expert

Jared Rhodes of the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation answers our pressing questions.

Rhode Island Monthly: What happens if we don’t rinse out recyclables? (We’re looking at you, peanut butter eaters.)
Jared Rhodes: It increases the chance that your materials and perhaps those of your neighbors whose yours are traveling with will get rejected by our inspectors, will not get recycled and will instead be landfilled.
RIM: Do we have to take off the sticky labels on cardboard boxes and grocery delivery bags in order to recycle them?
JR: No.
RIM: My trash or recycling bin is broken/was stolen/blew away. How do I get a new one?
JR: The best place to start is usually to contact your local Department of Public Works or property management office.
RIM: What’s the weirdest thing someone’s accidentally recycled?
JR: You name it we’ve seen it, but if I had to pick just one, I would go with the foosball table that showed up this spring.