Rainbow Disposal

Here are some photos I took on a recent field trip to our local trash company, Rainbow Disposal. I think this was one of the most interesting field trips I've ever been on. It was so informative to find out how our trash is collected, sorted and disposed off.

Some interesting things I learned:

-Before our economy tanked, the trash companies knew something was up, because we started producing less trash.
-The hawk and falconer happened to be visiting for two weeks to help keep all the seagulls out of the trash.
-People actually sort through all of our trash on huge conveyor belts. It's a smelly job, and they have found women age 30 to 40 seem to do this job best. These workers pull out the recyclables, and the rest heads to the dump about 20 miles away.
-Oops, I'm not supposed to put veggie scraps into our green bids like in other communities. The green bids are used to make soil and mulch, so that's a no no.
-You might think this place smells really bad, surprisingly not so. They use huge snow blower machines that blow a special deodorizer into the air that catches the odors and they fall to the ground. Street sweepers sweep the ground all day to pick up the particles.
-Our trash trucks run on Compressed Natural Gas, so they are clean machines.
-I was very excited to learn that you can come by the hazardous material drop off and shop for paint that people have brought in that are over half way filled. I'm so going to do this for a project I'm going to start soon.