Today’s Hartford Courant included a glimpse into the life of the man who runs the largest trash processing plant in the state. And over more than 20 years, John Romano has seen it all. “Oh, the coins, it’s the coins that fascinate me,” he said, of the nickels and dimes and pennies that litter like heaps of confetti. “People, I guess, don’t like pennies.”
The Hartford plant doesn’t have a way of extracting these valuables from their conveyer belts that handle more than 70 towns worth of daily refuse, tons and tons, per day. But other plants do, and they reap more than $2000 per week in thrown-away coins.
He often gets asked if he can find items that were accidentally thrown out. “They tell me, ‘I know what my garbage bag looks like,’ believe me, that’s a quote. He laughs at this, ‘which one is yours? Has it got your name on it?”
This plant makes steam, and then electricity, by burning trash from a never-ending stream of garbage. Steel, nonburnable waste, and other metals are picked out, with all of the rest shredded into 6-inch pieces.
Visitors from other countries come and marvel at the plant, they can’t believe there is this much trash here in the US. Since 1980, we’ve doubled the amount of trash we produce, now 4 1/2 pounds per person, per day.
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The management of the building where I work pays a well know trash hauler a fee to separate recycling from the trash that is hauled out each day.Does anyone actually believe this works?Questions to ponder:1. Is the daily trash from this building kept separate from all other trash picked up or does the hauler separate recyclables from everyone’s trash?2. How is the separation accomplished? Is there a plastic soda bottle magnet, an aluminum can magnet, an office paper magnet, and a cardboard box magnet?3. Are magnets any more outrageous than imagining a “dis-assemmbly” line of workers removing anything more than a token percentage of the recyclables?4. Is the Brooklyn Bridge due to change ownership?