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Transcript

Household Waste: What Goes Where · Clean Water Works

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: I am excited about this.
• 0:02
  Speaker 2: I never got like any sort of prep questions or anything.
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: so whatever you guys find no, we try not to give too much information so that it just comes off really natural and nervous, perfect.
• 0:11
  Speaker 3: That's the vibe Flick jazz.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: We're a little giddy coming off the weekend.
• 0:19
  Speaker 3: It's basically Friday it is basically Friday.
• 0:21
  Speaker 3: Right Holiday week, are you going to go to fireworks?
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: Probably.
• 0:26
  Speaker 3: You're not like anti-fireworks because of water I mean air quality.
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: I mean, they're not great, but they're going to happen For once a year.
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: I think I'm probably more anti-fireworks than like dogs and stuff.
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: Oh sure, yeah, oh yeah.
• 0:39
  Speaker 3: It's going to be a rough week it was already popping over at my house.
• 0:42
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it was not great.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: Donna, if you're like me, you have things.
• 0:48
  Speaker 3: Which I'm certainly not but continue.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: You have things lying around your house that you don't know what to do with.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: Things like old light bulbs, sure Batteries, motor oil, old paint Tires.
• 1:00
  Speaker 3: Fireworks Dynamite.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: Right, what do you do with this stuff?
• 1:04
  Speaker 3: I mean, I don't I don't know, we're in luck.
• 1:07
  Speaker 3: Today we have Matt Walters, who is a special recycling programs coordinator.
• 1:11
  Speaker 3: Is that correct?
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:12
  Speaker 3: Yep, okay, at Cuyahoga County Solid Waste District.
• 1:16
  Speaker 3: You are over in Garfield Heights.
• 1:19
  Speaker 3: Yes, okay, and how long have you worked there?
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: I've been there for about four years.
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: Started kind of peak pandemic, so it's been a fun ride.
• 1:26
  Speaker 3: So can you tell us a little bit about your job at the?
• 1:29
  Speaker 3: Do you call it the CCSWD, the Solid Waste District?
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I manage all of our special recycling programs.
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: That ranges from household hazardous waste that cities collect we do batteries and bulbs in-house by appointment waste that cities collect we do batteries and bulbs in-house by appointment.
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: Things like campaign signs, holiday lights, electronics that people drop off, our tire program that we do and any of those kind of specialty recycling items that are hard to get rid of in other ways.
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: I help manage the programs to help with those.
• 1:58
  Speaker 3: I feel like a lot of those items end up getting dumped if they don't end up going to you or like improperly disposed of.
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, certainly a lot of them can be thrown away, but there are recycling options for them, and some of them should not be thrown away Things like propane tanks and things like that that are dangerous.
• 2:16
  Speaker 3: So if we give you a bunch of holiday lights, where do they go after we give them to you?
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: So those we work with the zoo for their Lights for Lions program.
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: We collect them throughout the year.
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: They do a large push around the holidays themselves as well, but we take them throughout the year.
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: They go there, they scrap them and then the money for that goes to fund their big cat research.
• 2:36
  Speaker 3: Oh, that's fascinating.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: I want to point out that a lot of the items that we're going to talk about today and how to dispose of those items, you can find all this information at CuyahogaRecyclesorg.
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: Correct, just the website for the Solid Waste District.
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and on that page there's a search bar that says what do I do with?
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: Just type in whatever it is you're looking for and there'll be a page to help you with it.
• 3:00
  Speaker 3: I have used that before and the website is very user-friendly.
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: Well, let's talk about recycling.
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: First of all, Household recycling, not even the hazardous stuff.
• 3:09
  Speaker 3: Just the regular stuff.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: Regular stuff In general.
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: What are the things that can be recycled and what are the things that people commonly recycle but they really can't be recycled here in Cuyahoga County?
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: So what can be recycled varies a little bit based on your community.
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: There's four waste haulers that service the 59 communities in the county.
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: Each of those four waste haulers collects slightly different things.
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: The kind of lowest common denominator stuff that's always safe to recycle is going to be cans, metal, steel cans and aluminum cans, paper and cardboard.
• 3:43
  Speaker 2: So any kind of paper and cardboard product is fine.
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: Glass jars and bottles are okay.
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: And then for plastics, if you just stick to just bottles and jugs, regardless of what community, and those are fine.
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: So anything with the opening smaller than the container itself, for your plastic peanut butter jars are fine they got the screw on lid, but any of those are certainly okay.
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: And then there are some other plastics that are acceptable in other communities.
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: But check with your community to find out what that is.
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: So we're not looking at the little number in the triangle.
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the number has nothing to do with whether an item is recyclable or not.
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: It really never has.
• 4:17
  Speaker 2: It was something the triangle was put on there by the plastics industry to make people associate it with recycling.
• 4:22
  Speaker 2: All that number indicates is what kind of plastic it was originally made from.
• 4:25
  Speaker 2: But whether or not that particular item is recyclable has to do with shape, and the process that the plastic went through when it was made into that item can change the chemical composition of it, make it like worse quality and things like that.
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: So yeah, just completely ignore the number, pretend like it's not there.
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: It has nothing to do with whether or not it can go in your recycle bin.
• 4:44
  Speaker 3: So when those recyclables go to the haulers, how do they get sorted and what happens after that?
• 4:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so the haulers have what's called a sorting facility.
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: It's a MRF.
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: It's what MRF is, what it's sorted into Material Recovery Facility.
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: But they have lots of really sophisticated machinery in there, some things ranging from conveyor belts and air blasts to knock certain things off.
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: Ooh, that's fun.
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: Agitators that shake the heavy stuff down, eddy currents that zap the aluminum out from other things, magnets, and then even, over the past few years, ai that scans stuff and can read exactly what kind of plastic it is, and stuff like that, so it knows where it's coming and how to sort it.
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: And then they sort it into the various components.
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: You know the different kinds of plastics, the metals, the paper, and then those get shipped off for processing.
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: So I have a question If I have a peanut butter jar and I don't get all the peanut butter out of it and I try and recycle that, what happens when you get the peanut butter jar that still has some peanut butter in it?
• 5:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the peanut butter jar that still has some peanut butter in it.
• 5:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, cleaner it can be, the better.
• 5:45
  Speaker 2: Always A little bit of food residue isn't going to shut the whole system down or anything, but if there's too much it will lower the quality of the stuff that it gets turned into.
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: The greases and stuff like that can affect the chemical processes when they try and recycle them later.
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: So always the cleaner you can get something, the better it is.
• 5:59
  Speaker 3: So that's why they're like anti-pizza box.
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the grease.
• 6:02
  Speaker 2: Empty, clean and dry is standard for that.
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: Do the communities pay the haulers or the haulers pay the community?
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: Currently, the communities are paying haulers when the prices for certain commodities come up or down.
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: It might generate some revenue for the community instead, as some of these commodities rise in price, which happens from time to time.
• 6:25
  Speaker 2: There can be some money to be made there, but most of the time it's communities paying haulers.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: So after the stuff is recycled, does someone buy it?
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: Then the clean recycled materials.
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so the haulers are putting it all together into big bales of paper or plastic or metal and then those are shipped off to different commodity manufacturers that then process it down into the recycled material, whether that's changing it into pellets with plastic, little pelletized plastic that is then used as material added to other plastics in the future, um.
• 6:55
  Speaker 2: Or the paper is like gone through the paper mill and kind of it usually has, uh, seven or so different uses of paper, from like the high quality office paper down to like toilet paper.
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: Each time it gets recycled it'll go down a level, um, but yeah, so it gets sold to the people who make those items out of the recycled material any um items that cannot be recycled that you frequently see in the recycling stream the most common ones we see are clamshells, which are those like berry containers.
• 7:25
  Speaker 2: Right, right, right yeah, there may be some answers for them coming up Currently most communities those are not recyclable.
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: Other kind of hard plastics like buckets or toys none of those can go in Tanglers people put in like things like hoses or plastic bags that get wrapped up all along machinery.
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: Those actually can shut down facilities.
• 7:45
  Speaker 2: They can get stuck around stuff.
• 7:46
  Speaker 2: There are answers for some of these materials outside of your curbside recycling.
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: But stick very cleanly to the things that we talked about before and you'll be safe.
• 7:55
  Speaker 2: Otherwise it can cause problems for some of the machinery.
• 7:57
  Speaker 2: The more efficient they can be, the better of an environmental process it is too.
• 8:01
  Speaker 2: They're not spending extra money to ship this stuff to the landfill.
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: It's almost like a stopgap measure.
• 8:08
  Speaker 2: It goes to them and then they have to off-sort it and spend electricity and manpower to do that, and then it still has to go to the landfill after that.
• 8:12
  Speaker 3: So really it's better for it to go straight to the landfill from your house it is a little, a little bit frustrating as a consumer, because when you go to the grocery store you do see a lot of those clamshells, whether it's berries or like salads nowadays too Like so many of them come in those, and I try so hard to avoid them, but then you still end up getting them in, like the plastic bag.
• 8:33
  Speaker 3: So then you kind of have to like buy the ones that are just in bulk outside of you know, are those clamshells just to Too thin?
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: Partially, yeah.
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: They're basically like the toilet paper of the plastic world.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: They're like super low quality really brittle.
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: So this is a good example of why the numbers aren't a good indicator.
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: Both plastic clamshells and a plastic water bottle are both number one plastics.
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: But plastic bottles are made like blowing glass.
• 9:00
  Speaker 2: They blow it out that way, whereas clamshells are made by thermoforming it.
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: It kind of gets melted over a model and that process, the heat and everything is different.
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: It changes.
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: It makes it really brittle and there's not much to do with it after the fact.
• 9:12
  Speaker 2: It also breaks up and kind of mimics glass.
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: It shards itself and so it's hard to sort as well.
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: Sure.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: So let's talk about things that we can't throw in the recycling, namely household hazardous waste and things like motor oil, gasoline oil, paints.
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: You have a program for proper disposal of these items.
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: We do so for household hazardous waste, specifically chemicals and other liquids and things like that.
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: Most cities have household hazardous waste collections throughout the year.
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: Each city does it a little bit differently.
• 9:46
  Speaker 2: Some cities do it just twice a year, some cities do it year-round at the service department.
• 9:51
  Speaker 2: Some do it once a month.
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: Cleveland, for instance, does it on the first Friday of each month.
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: So each city does it differently.
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: You know our website lists on your city's page if you go to our website what those hours and dates are, so you can check on that.
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: So household hazardous waste is really defined as anything that's hazardous that came from your house.
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: It cannot be anything that came from a business.
• 10:12
  Speaker 2: It can't be anything that was used for a business, even if it's the same material you might have at your house.
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: And it can't really, it's not really supposed to be anything that you can't just kind of find at a regular.
• 10:22
  Speaker 2: You know Walmart, home Depot off the shelf kind of material.
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: What do you mean?
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: Plutonium, we see some weird stuff.
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: You know, if somebody like has an uncle who used to be a science teacher and he hoarded all of his stuff that he had throughout the time, or a chemist used to work at a chemistry place.
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: They take stuff home, they put it in the basement, then they pass away and someone's clearing out their house and then all of a sudden they have this horde of lab chemicals and things I haven't seen.
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: plutonium yet.
• 10:49
  Speaker 2: I have seen uranium, though.
• 10:50
  Speaker 3: Oh gosh.
• 10:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 10:52
  Speaker 3: Or like mercury thermometers, like that kind of thing.
• 10:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah, those are all okay.
• 10:55
  Speaker 2: So general categories of household hazardous waste are flammable liquids, so that's gasoline, kerosene, oil-based paints anything like that Acidic and basic household cleaners.
• 11:07
  Speaker 2: So anything with like a corrosive or caustic warning on it.
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: Perhaps this includes stuff like a toilet bowl cleaner or Drano.
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: Mercury thermometers are fine Other mercury-containing devices like thermostats.
• 11:20
  Speaker 2: There's always a little bit of mercury in there.
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: We get strange numbers of people with like jars of mercury.
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: I'm not sure where they get it all, but we've seen large quantities of it come in Pesticides and herbicides.
• 11:32
  Speaker 2: So that's anything that kills something specifically.
• 11:34
  Speaker 2: So if it's just a fertilizer that just makes your plants grow better, that's not hazardous.
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: It can either just go in the trash or just go spread it on your lawn.
• 11:41
  Speaker 2: But if it has like a weed and feed where it kills some plants or kills some pests, that would be a pesticide or herbicide.
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: Go through your city's household hazardous waste collection and then automotive fluids, oil, antifreeze, windshield wiper fluid, and it's flammable.
• 11:56
  Speaker 2: That would be the kind of examples of stuff you would bring to your city's collection.
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: If you have other weird stuff, you could try bringing it to your city.
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: They may have questions for you, like if you are cleaning out your uncle's house.
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: That was a chemist likely.
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: They'll point you in my direction so we can talk about it and make sure there's nothing especially dangerous and figure out the best way to handle it from there.
• 12:15
  Speaker 3: And I think on the website there are like if it isn't one of those things that you just mentioned, you guys do have recommendations of other places you can take certain things.
• 12:25
  Speaker 2: There are businesses that handle some of that material, like the non-household hazardous waste stuff.
• 12:30
  Speaker 2: If you're a business I have to send you there Like legally you can't use the household hazardous waste program it needs to go through one of those businesses.
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: If you're a resident that came across some of that material, we'll talk about some options.
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: It's very costly to deal with.
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: We're talking like several thousand dollars to deal with a lot of that stuff.
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: Okay, so what happens to all that stuff?
• 12:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it depends on what it is, but you work with an environmental service company to handle it.
• 12:56
  Speaker 2: They come twice a month to our facility where the cities bring us the material they've collected.
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: The flammable liquids are mostly used as fuel to fuel like cement kilns, which are used to incinerate some of the stuff like pesticides and herbicides and aerosol cans, and then the acidic and basic stuff is neutralized and taken to specialty landfills and then the mercury oil and antifreeze is mostly tried to be recycled.
• 13:19
  Speaker 2: They try and reuse that stuff as best they can, and aerosol cans are the last household hazardous waste item too.
• 13:24
  Speaker 2: I didn't mention anything in an aerosol can.
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: Regardless of what it is, is fine to bring.
• 13:28
  Speaker 3: Oh, okay, so those should be recycled.
• 13:30
  Speaker 3: You probably could throw those away, but you shouldn't.
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: If they're empty which federally empty quote-unquote means less than 3% remaining of the material inside of it then it can go in the trash.
• 13:41
  Speaker 2: That's true for any of these products.
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: Really, the best thing to do with any of these is to use them for their intended purpose, rather than bringing them to one of these facilities.
• 13:49
  Speaker 2: So you know, for paints, try not to buy too much.
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: Use the appropriate amount Acidic.
• 13:54
  Speaker 2: If you're cleaners and things like that, you know, use them to clean your house with, rather than throwing them out or bringing them to a facility is really the best.
• 14:00
  Speaker 2: Thing to do.
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: Another thing your department tries to do, in addition to offering these proper disposal collection events, is encouraging people to use alternatives to standard cleaning products, and household substances.
• 14:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there are more environmentally friendly cleaning products.
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: Lots of recipes you can find online.
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: They usually involve something like vinegar and baking soda, um, things like that.
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it is an important next step, for this is mitigating some of the stuff that could be out there and used um.
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: But yeah, there's lots of you know thing like suggestions, things like when you're buying paint, don't buy huge quantities and just keep it in your basement because eventually you're not going to need it and then you have to do something with it.
• 14:45
  Speaker 2: So there are estimators out there.
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: Try and use the estimators to figure out a more appropriate amount of paint to use.
• 14:51
  Speaker 2: Latex paint actually isn't even included in household hazardous waste.
• 14:54
  Speaker 2: We get questions about it a lot.
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that can go right in the trash, right?
• 14:57
  Speaker 2: You just dry it out as long as it's dried out.
• 14:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 14:59
  Speaker 3: And they make those packets that you can mix into Latex paint, because otherwise it takes a really long time to dry.
• 15:05
  Speaker 2: You can always use cat litter as well.
• 15:07
  Speaker 3: Oh fun fact, One of the reasons that we're having you in is because a lot of the waste that you're talking about, if it weren't going to go to you, it could end up in a storm drain or thrown into a quote unquote ditch, which is oftentimes a stream into a floodplain things like that caiga county area.
• 15:32
  Speaker 3: When it comes to dumping and pollution, sure?
• 15:34
  Speaker 2: uh.
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: So since we started this particular version of our program, where the cities collect the material and bring it to us, we call it our hub and spoke method.
• 15:42
  Speaker 2: Before that, we had just a couple of collections of the fair grounds, so the hub and spoke method started in 2011.
• 15:48
  Speaker 2: Since then, we've collected somewhere a little over a little north of five and a half million pounds of this material.
• 15:54
  Speaker 2: Um, and you know, all that could have gone down the drain, you know, um, or at least might not have been handled appropriately before that.
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: Um, annually, it's average of 400 000 pounds, or so it's been.
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: Notably, though, it's been dropping a little bit every year, and we like to think that we're getting rid of some of that like stockpiled material.
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: Every year it's a little bit less, which is hopefully a good sign.
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: I do think when it comes to stockpiling material, like you were saying, like when someone passes away and you just go in the basement and you're like, oh no, oh no, when am I going to take some of this stuff?
• 16:26
  Speaker 3: And the county seems to be a good option for that.
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: On our storm drains, or a lot of the storm drains.
• 16:37
  Speaker 3: You'll see the stencils that say you know, this goes to the lake, might be a fish on it.
• 16:40
  Speaker 3: You see those in other communities a lot too, but hopefully folks know that a lot of your storm sewers are, you know, directly tied to a tributary in your area, even if you live in a combined sewer area.
• 16:53
  Speaker 3: If there is a combined sewer overflow event or something like that, it can go to the environment.
• 16:58
  Speaker 3: And even if it doesn't go to the environment it can go to a wastewater treatment plant which can also be damaged because there are living processes at our wastewater treatment plants.
• 17:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean to that point.
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: Notably, none of this material should be just poured down the drain, so don't consider that a way to dispose of it.
• 17:14
  Speaker 2: Leave it in the bottle if you really don't want to use it, and take it to one of these places but don't pour it out anywhere.
• 17:21
  Speaker 2: Really, yeah, I do know you guys provide us with some funding each year that it goes towards the household hazardous waste program.
• 17:27
  Speaker 2: I know it's one special interest about, like the mercury collecting um to try and keep it out of stuff.
• 17:33
  Speaker 3: We accept mercury thermometers.
• 17:34
  Speaker 3: I believe too at our EMSC site during the week.
• 17:37
  Speaker 3: So if folks have thermometers or fire detectors, You're talking like smoke detectors.
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: Smoke detectors, those actually don't have mercury.
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: They have the radioactive which they actually should not go through or else they'll have hazardous waste.
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: That's one of the ones that's a weird one.
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: They should either go in the regular trash Any one particular smoke detector doesn't have enough radiation to really make a difference but when they get stockpiled all together they can actually set off radiation alarms and stuff at waste facilities.
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: Radioactive yeah, some little ionizing thing in there.
• 18:12
  Speaker 3: It's interesting.
• 18:14
  Speaker 2: Newer ones are moving away from that, but many of them still have it.
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: And then in most smoke detecting, smoke detector companies have take back programs.
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: So you can like, mail them back.
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: Your your old ones and they'll take them I see okay to the point about mercury, we started taking fluorescent tubes in our facility by appointment a couple years ago.
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: Um, notably, that's the the by appointment part there is important.
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: We don't want people just chopping them off but we don't charge.
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: We just have to make sure that we're ready to accept them when somebody wants to bring them.
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: That again has to be just residents.
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: We're not allowed to take business waste, and the only other option for those tubes are batteries plus stores, and they charge a little bit for them, but they'll take them too.
• 18:53
  Speaker 3: Okay, that's good to know.
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: Light bulbs have changed a lot over the last 20 years, haven't?
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: they they have for the better.
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: Pretty much all of them can go in the trash, except for the fluorescent tubes, because they have the mercury in them.
• 19:05
  Speaker 2: None of the rest of them are dangerous, whether it's incandescent or halogen, which aren't allowed to be sold anymore because of that Biden ruling.
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: But nowadays almost all of them are led and those are fine to go in the trash.
• 19:18
  Speaker 3: Okay, good to know what's your favorite part about your job?
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: oh, I really like, uh, seeing some of the weird stuff that people have accumulated over the years.
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: Uh, some of it is dangerous, so we've seen some pretty nasty stuff come in like what like what uh, picric acid, which picric acid?
• 19:35
  Speaker 2: picric, it wasn't something I was aware of until I started this job.
• 19:37
  Speaker 2: You'd think, okay, it's just an acid.
• 19:40
  Speaker 2: This is not something you should ever find in your house, by the way.
• 19:42
  Speaker 2: If you have it, give me a call.
• 19:44
  Speaker 2: But when it dries, it crystallizes and those crystals are highly explosive.
• 19:49
  Speaker 2: This is like clear out the college to go bring some of the bomb squad into the basement to get rid of it sort of a situation.
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: Um, and we've seen some just come in on a truck to us and, uh, our chemical guys get really annoyed, you know, because their life is on the line.
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: Uh, we see that about once a year or so.
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: Um, so, yeah, any kind of lab chemicals if you have them, if you find them in your basement, if you find them in an uncle's basement, call me about them.
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: Just call the.
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: Salad Waste District and ask me.
• 20:18
  Speaker 2: We'll talk about them because some of them are not safe.
• 20:21
  Speaker 2: Our phone number is 216-443-3749.
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: That's our main line.
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: Just whoever answers can help you out.
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: Does your department encourage composting?
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: Karen Miller is our compost specialist.
• 20:35
  Speaker 2: She's also our education specialist and she does pretty frequent seminars online about composting.
• 20:41
  Speaker 2: We sell compost bins and other composting supplies probably as cheap as you'll find it anywhere.
• 20:47
  Speaker 2: We sell them at cost, so we buy them in bulk and then sell them off.
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: Oh, that's nice and we can answer questions about it too.
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: Certainly the more.
• 20:55
  Speaker 2: That's direct weighted tonnage that gets taken out of the landfill when you're composting it in your backyard.
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: Plus, you get the added benefit of having a nice handy, usable soil afterwards.
• 21:04
  Speaker 2: I do compost at home.
• 21:08
  Speaker 2: We try and buy as much in cardboard packaging as we can, but I've got two young kids so that's hard.
• 21:16
  Speaker 3: Lots of plastic packaging out there, for they love those squeeze tube fruit things oh man, so much of those.
• 21:21
  Speaker 2: I know microplastics for days, yeah everywhere it's crazy, um, but you know, uh, you can do the best you can in your situation at home it's always better to do something than nothing, and remember that in the three r's they get reduced, reuse and recycle.
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: Recycling is the last one for a reason like recycle as much as you can, but really the reducing and reusing are way better ways of dealing with a lot of that waste.
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: Um, because the recycling still has to be processed and use energy and all that kind of stuff too we do have a pitch the pills effort that we have undertaken for pharmaceuticals.
• 21:56
  Speaker 3: I think that started a little while ago.
• 21:58
  Speaker 3: Do you dabble in that as well?
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: We don't do much along with it.
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: We get questions about it a lot, so we refer people to the sheriff's departments for their pills, for their liquid medications.
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: You don't take those to the sheriff's department.
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: Really, the best thing to do with them is to mix it with dirt or coffee grounds or sawdust, something to make it unusable, and then throw it away in the trash like in a trash bag Again.
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: Don't pour it down the drain.
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: We don't want all these medications mixing with stuff anywhere.
• 22:29
  Speaker 2: It's not something that should go through household hazardous waste as well.
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: They can't take any sort of pharmaceuticals or medications or bio-waste or anything like that.
• 22:38
  Speaker 3: We do have a website.
• 22:39
  Speaker 3: If you have additional pills, maybe from a surgery or something like that, it's neorsdorg backslash pitch those pills and you can help us out by finding those drop-off locations in your community.
• 22:51
  Speaker 3: I know a lot of times it's at city hall or police stations.
• 22:54
  Speaker 3: I know a lot of times it's at City Hall or police stations, things like that where you can take those pills so that they don't end up in our water source.
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: Obviously, our two organizations have similar goals in trying to keep people from dumping stuff down the drain, and so it's a really good partnership that we want to promote.
• 23:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's all great.
• 23:13
  Speaker 2: And you know we also work closely with the Environmental Crimes Task Force in Cleveland, so if there's ever any kind of illegal dumping in anywhere, whether it's near a water source or not, they're a good place to call to report that and they do a lot of research to put up cameras and all that.
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: So the Environmental Crimes Task Force Did you know about this?
• 23:31
  Speaker 3: I did.
• 23:31
  Speaker 3: Yeah, you got to get them on too.
• 23:33
  Speaker 3: That would be fun.
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: For more information on proper disposal, again visit CuyahogaRecyclesorg.
• 23:41
  Speaker 2: You can also call us this Monday through Friday, 830 to 430.
• 23:44
  Speaker 2: We're happy to answer phone calls at any point.
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: You can also submit a question on the website as well if we can't find the answer there, and we try and respond to those as quick as we can.
• 23:54
  Speaker 2: If you go to the Cogre recyclesorg, you can either enable a location and it'll find your city that you're in, or you can select from a dropdown on your city's page.
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: There's lots of information about your city specific what they accept recycling wise, if they have any special collection programs, as well as what their household hazardous waste one is.
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: Under there's a proper disposal tab and on that one it'll list household hazardous waste and tires and things like that Great.
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: I would like to say one thing about the household hazardous waste that wasn't mentioned before.
• 24:24
  Speaker 2: Do treat these chemicals with respect.
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: Even if they are stuff you bought from Home Depot and stuff, they are really just smaller quantities of just as dangerous as business waste and industrial waste and don't mix anything under your sink.
• 24:38
  Speaker 2: Keep it all separate as best you can.
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: You can hurt yourself by some of these chemicals.
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: So just treat them with respect, use them with their like desired instructions and all that and you'll be fine so eye protection, a barrier for your hands, usually gloves of some kind.
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: Don't sniff anything too deeply.
• 24:57
  Speaker 3: No inhaling deeply on your toilet bowl.
• 25:00
  Speaker 3: Cleaner Right.
• 25:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah, really just make sure nothing mixes.
• 25:04
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: Because easily you can make some really dangerous like kill you chemicals by mixing some of this stuff under your sink.
• 25:10
  Speaker 3: All right, that's good to know.
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: I do offer a class like a one-hour presentation about what we talked about today household hazardous waste and how you can dispose of it all.
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, For anybody who would like it.
• 25:22
  Speaker 2: Like I've had city service departments have me come out and do it for like their you know, lunch with a policeman or whatever sort of events that they do.
• 25:30
  Speaker 2: And then I've had lots of several green teams have me come out and talk to the green teams.
• 25:34
  Speaker 2: But really I can do it for any group who would like me to come do it.
• 25:37
  Speaker 3: Oh, that's great.
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we talk about what household hazardous waste is, with examples and pictures and things, and we talk about how to deal with that material what isn't collected through the household hazardous waste program things like tires and the mercury bulbs and things like that that have other ways of disposing of them, and then what happens to the material.
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: And we'll talk about how much your city generates and that kind of stuff too.
• 26:00
  Speaker 3: Oh, that's cool.
• 26:00
  Speaker 3: How'd you get into this field again?
• 26:02
  Speaker 3: Yeah, did you go to school around here?
• 26:04
  Speaker 2: No, I moved up from Florida.
• 26:06
  Speaker 3: Oh, it's cold here.
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: It is.
• 26:08
  Speaker 3: And you're like cool with that.
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, now I am.
• 26:11
  Speaker 3: Now you are okay, You're over it and you're like not missing alligators or sunshine.
• 26:17
  Speaker 3: No alligators.
• 26:17
  Speaker 2: a little bit Sunshine.
• 26:19
  Speaker 2: I'm okay with it.
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: Got too hot in Florida.
• 26:21
  Speaker 3: Okay, all right.
• 26:23
  Speaker 2: I do miss the alligators.
• 26:24
  Speaker 2: They were fun.
• 26:26
  Speaker 3: And how did you land in Cleveland Ohio?
• 26:30
  Speaker 2: I followed a girl, classic.
• 26:32
  Speaker 3: Classic Ohio love story.
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: Most people in Ohio have the same thing.
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: That's the statistic.
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: That's why Ohio exists.
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: It's the heart of it all, exactly.
• 26:42
  Speaker 3: Eighty-nine percent of Ohioans followed a girl.
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: All right, matt Walters, special Recycling Programs Coordinator.
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: Was that your title?
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: With the Cuyahoga County Solid Waste District.
• 26:56
  Speaker 3: Thanks very much for joining us today.
• 26:57
  Speaker 3: Thanks for having me, yeah, thanks so.