How is Paper Recycled?

According to the American Forest & Paper Association (AF&PA), 55 percent of the paper consumed in the U.S. was recovered for recycling in 2007. This significant achievement was made possible by the millions of Americans who recycle at home, work, and school every day.
In fact, if measured by weight, more paper is recovered for recycling from municipal solid waste streams than all glass, plastic and aluminum combined. Additional good news: every ton of paper recovered for recycling saves 3.3 cubic yards of landfill space.

Paper Recycling Starts with Us
Paper recycling begins with you and me. The paper recycling process begins at any number of locations, including community curbside programs, drop-off centers, schools or offices. Regardless of where the recycling process starts, it is important to understand what materials can be recovered in your community and how to properly prepare them for recycling.

How Is Paper Recycled Once Collected?
After it is collected, recovered paper is transferred to a recycling center, or Material Recovery Facility (MRF), where it is sorted into its different grades and “contaminants” such as trash, glass, plastics and metals are removed. Once the recovered paper is properly sorted and free of contaminants, it is compacted into large bales and transported to a paper mill where the recycling process begins.
To begin the papermaking process using recovered fiber, the fiber is shredded and mixed with water to make a pulp. The pulp is washed, refined and cleaned, then turned to slush in a beater. The process of papermaking from that point forward is essentially the same whether or not recovered fiber is used.

Trash and Recycling

Trash and Recycling
The City of Temecula contracts with CR&R Inc. for trash and recycling services. CR&R provides the most cost effective method of trash collection with a state of the art recycling and green waste program. Automated collection is an efficient and safe process for collecting residential waste and recyclables. Through the use of a mechanical arm operated by the driver, trash is collected quickly and neatly. Each home is furnished with three special containers which residents roll out to the curb on collection day.

Trash Collection Tips:
Collection TimeBins should be placed at the curb or in the street by 6:00 am on your designated trash pick up day. Bins should be placed no more than 24 hours prior to normal collection time and removed within 12 hours after collection. Trash bins shall be stored out of public view.

Street Sweeping and Parking
All residential streets are swept by CR&R the day following the trash service day. If trash service is provided on Friday, the streets are swept on Monday. Please refrain from parking on the residential streets on both trash collection and street sweeping days in order allow CR&R to provide efficient trash collection and street sweeping services.


Holiday Schedule Trash Pick-up
This is a reminder that during the holidays your trash collection will be delayed one day. For example, if your normal trash day is Monday, your trash will be collected on Tuesday, etc. If your normal trash day is Friday, your trash will be collected on Saturday. Holidays will affect the street sweeping schedule, unless the holiday occurs on Saturday or Sunday. Holidays for the year are New Year's Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas Day. If any of these holidays fall on a Saturday or Sunday, normal collection will be provided.

Recycled drinking water 'a tough sell'

Western Australia's Opposition says the Government is going to have a tough job convincing Perth residents to drink recycled water.

The Water Minister, Graham Jacobs, has released a strategy to address the rapid decline of water levels in the Gnangara system, which provides 60 per cent of Perth's water supply.

If the recommendations are adopted, the groundwater system will be recharged with recycled water.

Dr Jacobs says West Australians need to get used to the idea, despite the 'yuck' factor.

The Opposition's spokesman for water, Fran Logan, supports the strategy, but says he is concerned about the public response to the longer-term recommendation to source water directly from waste water treatment plants.

"With respect to taking waste water directly from a sewerage works and then putting them through a recycling plant and turning it into straight drinking water, I think the Minister is going to have a big job on his hands convincing West Australians that's fine and that's ok to drink," he said.

Mr Logan says more money needs to be spent expanding the aquifer.

"The Minister has allowed his portfolio to be slashed," he said.

"If he [Graham Jacobs] stood up for his portfolio, he might be able to get some of that critical money poured into the infrastructure that we need to manage the state's water resources and ensure our water security into the future, particularly as we go into increasingly drying years."

The draft strategy is open for public comment for two months.

San Diego Learns How to Recycle Water

Above: San Diego's North City Water Reclamation Plant (NCWRP) is the first large-scale water reclamation plant in San Diego's history and part of the single largest sewerage system expansion in the area. This facility can treat up to 30 million gallons of wastewater per day, which is generated by northern San Diego communities.

SAN DIEGO — The ultimate solution to California's water dilemma will draw on many sources. And one of them will be the supply of water we currently throw away. The water that goes down the drain, and down the toilet, can be reused. But finding the best way for San Diego to recycle is a technical and political question.

Recycling wastewater is nothing new. It's common and often unavoidable. Alan Rimer is a water reuse specialist with the firm Black and Veatch. He says wastewater reuse has taken many forms.

"I grew up in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania," he says. "And when I flushed my toilet, it went into the Ohio River with some treatment, and Cincinnati drank that water after taking it out of riverbank wells and treating it. And that's what we call indirect potable reuse."

To water reuse experts, San Diego is famous for the expression "toilet to tap." It arose about ten years ago when the city's first effort to reuse wastewater as potable water did a political crash and burn. But the reality of today's water shortage has put wastewater recycling back on the table. That's why San Diego is embarking on a plan to test a system for "reservoir augmentation." Wastewater will be purified to an advanced level so it could be piped to the San Vicente Resevoir, where it would become part of San Diego's supply of drinking water.

Marsi Steirer, with the San Diego Public Utilities Department, says, for now, the goal is test some new equipment at the North City Water Reclamation Plant.

"Basically what we're constructing as a temporary plant is a one million gallon a day advanced water treatment facility," she says.

The north city plant currently treats about nine million gallons of wastewater every day that's reused, mainly for irrigation. This kind of reuse requires a dual delivery system, since the North City plant doesn't currently treat its recycled water to the level of drinking water. The non-potable water flows through purple pipes to golf courses, parks and freeway medians. But the North City plant recycles less than half of what it could, due to a very limited distribution system.

Mixing highly treated wastewater with a city's drinking water supply, reservoir augmentation, is what they already do in part of Northern Virginia. Chuck Boepple is executive director of the Upper Occoquan service authority. He says his plant's wastewater is treated and discharged into the historic creek called Bull Run. That leads to a reservoir that provides drinking water for a million people in suburban Washington D.C. Boepple adds the water he puts in Bull Run is very clean.

"Our effluent, as a matter of fact, meets drinking water standards. Every parameter that EPA has on maximum contaminant levels for drinking water… we're beneath those levels," he says.

So why does Occoquan put safe drinking water in the reservoir where it'll just get dirty and need to be treated again? Beopple says doing a system where water really goes straight from toilet and tub to treatment to tap is still unacceptable to the public. Maybe so. But the water San Diego draws from the Colorado River contains lightly treated wastewater Las Vegas dumps into Lake Mead. Some say that the water people in New Orleans drink, that comes from the Mississippi River, has already been through about nine sets of human intestines.

Rick Gersberg is a public health professor at San Diego state, and he's on an advisory task force for the San Diego water recycling project. He says scientists can talk all they want to about actual health risks of recycled, drinking water. But what the public perceives as sanitary, is just as meaningful.

"Maybe a scientist would say 'Well, you know, risk is just the numbers we calculate.' But if you're dealing with risk and you're expecting to communicate and inform and have acceptance of a certain project, then that strictly science opinion is not the way it happens," says Gersberg.

Reusing wastewater has a political price and it has a monetary price. If the San Diego water recycling project becomes reservoir augmentation, it'll require a permanent treatment facility and a pipeline. The total cost would be at least $237 million.