What's thrown away is often forgotten, but what we no longer use tends to carry on a story of its own long after we toss it into the recycling or trash bin.
It was a year ago when curbside-recycling pickup was brought to Estevan residents after the City of Estevan decided to include the service along with continuing trash pickup.
The garbage and recycling worlds are largely unseen by most of the public, and with households paying about $5 for recycling to get picked up two weeks every month, where have these 425,000 kilograms of material gone over the past year?
At Regens Disposal, the City's recycling contractor, Logan Baniulis spends a lot of time thinking about recycling, how it's picked up, where it goes and what we will be recycling in the future.
Baniulis noted that as landfill space becomes more valuable with fewer square feet available, what will be an accepted recycled good will increase.
"What we find is if we're not going to take it and recycle it, it's going to end up in a garbage container. If it's going to end up in a garbage container then it's going to take up valuable space in the landfill," he said. "Sometimes it will pay to recycle something if the revenue from the materials break even because you're saving space in your landfill. We're recycling more and more things."
He said asphalt shingles will at some point in the future be accepted through recycling, though that is on the "backburner."
"We're lucky in the Prairies because we have all this land, but once you have to put your garbage on an engineered landfill, that space has value to it," said Baniulis. When that landfill fills and space becomes sparse, recycling becomes that much more vital.
As a means of slowing the growth of the landfill, trucks pick up single-stream material across Estevan twice a month. The material is hauled to the Regens Recycling Depot, a material receiving facility, east of Bienfait. He noted the facility will be expanding in the future and includes a scrap-metal recycling facility.
At the facility the material brought goes through a "floor sort" where the material spread out on the floor and is sorted and baled.
"We do what we can through a floor sort to separate the material. With the material from the city, that material is all baled together," said Baniulis.
Materials, primarily cardboard and paper, are sorted manually, though Baniulis said as volumes increase, particularly with more rural areas starting their own single-stream recycling programs, equipment will be brought in to separate the cardboard from paper.
"What you want is the most refined material that you can. The stuff that has additional value, you want to pull out from the stuff that lowers value."
The material is stored by commodity before it is shipped.
"There is a degree of processing going on at our facility. The cardboard that we ship is ready to be processed or ground into new material."
They also ship mixed fibre, which is cardboard and paper mixed, single-stream material, plastic and tin. They all go to different places, and on any given day, the material is shipped to anywhere between five to 10 destinations.
The majority of the newsprint, Baniulis noted, is shipped to an Edmonton facility.
Where it goes is determined by a variety of factors, like freight costs and what the going rate is at the moment for different commodities.
"It's always changing. Once you find a good destination that's paying a good value for the material, generally you're going to ship there until you find another dollar or something changes with their facility," said Baniulis.
One of their buyers recently installed new equipment at their facility and were no longer able to accept the same commodity. Where the material goes may change on a weekly basis.
"(Recently) we shipped our first load to a different buyer of newsprint who is paying 20 to 25 per cent more," noted Baniulis.
He said freight is a big factor determining where recycled material goes, whether the issues are about distance or whether the routes are hitting more prominent arteries of travel.
There are a number of plants in Minnesota where Regens sends Estevan's recycled goods. Shipping this material internationally does present some paperwork issues, but once the contracts are set up, the transportation becomes more routine.
With so many facilities available to accept the material, recycling contractors have options, because despite throwing something away, sometimes a little bit of its value is retained in the recycling process.
