The State of the Art in Solid Waste Disposal is on display at the EDCO facility in Escondido. Two of the three waste streams that city residents pay for removal are processed there. (Your grey “caddy” is for trash, which goes directly to the landfill.)
EDCO is a family owned company with a multi-generational workforce. They have had the solid waste franchise agreement with the City of Encinitas since incorporation. Their website describes the work they do like this:
With a focus on recycling, EDCO has developed an extensive network of Material Recovery Facilities, Construction and Demolition Processing Facilities, Commingled Recycling Processing Centers, Recycling Buyback Centers, Household Hazardous Waste Collection Centers, and an Anaerobic Digestion (AD) Facility that is collectively designed to maximize recovery efforts. The collective resources of these facilities, supported by a wide array of front-line equipment and our dedicated team members, have allowed EDCO to create collection programs that are tailored to the unique operating conditions of local communities.
My tour last week included the opportunity to see the Material Recovery Facility, colloquially referred to as a “Murph” because of the MRF initials. I also got the chance to see the Anaerobic Digestion equipment, which was very impressive.
One of the first sorting steps is to remove all the plastic bags that are in the waste stream. Plastic bags are the bane of a recycling line’s existence.
This video shows the recyclable material, mostly plastics, after it has been through several sorting steps. The bed it is on is vibrating the material to help spread it onto the conveyor. There is a camera tells a machine that sends a burst of air through the conveyor to blast the plastic up into a vacuum hood where the material is sent to a bailer for transport to be recycled.
