I guess I'm an average consumer. I didn't mind recycling because the thought of all that material (glass, paper, aluminum cans and plastic) going into a landfill was an affront to me. Newport has a program whereby the residential waste is sent to a Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) but since my household uses a trash compactor, I wondered if materials inside the compactor bag were also sorted. I called the city and left a message for the General Services/Waste office.
What I wanted to know was what happens to all that glass when it gets crushed and broken in the trash trucks. An employee called back and said that Newport Beach recovers 50% of the waste that is processed through the MRF and that they are pretty sophisticated in the recovery operations. Good to know, but I also thought, "Well, I can get 100% recovery by recycling."
So, as an environmentally-conscious consumer, I separated the recyclables and stored the containers in my garage until it got to the point where the mass became obtrusive. So I checked online to see when Garcia's was open. They were a Costa Mesa recycling business that no longer is there. The city of Costa Mesa didn't renew their operating permits and shut them down. I guess there were complaints about noise, the homeless, etc., and now they're gone.
