They call it the “Murph.” The giant Materials Recovery Facility at Eureka Recycling in Northeast Minneapolis sorts through 400 tons of recyclables from Minneapolis and St. Paul every single day.
“We’re actually not doing any recycling,” said Lynn Hoffman, co-president of Eureka. “We’re just sorting, cleaning it up, and then getting it ready to go back into new products.”
Eureka sells the products back to companies that can use them to turn into new products—glass, plastic, and paper goods that go back out to consumers.
Hoffman said a new Greenpeace study—which found that only about five percent of plastic gets recycled—may be misunderstood by those who thought they were doing everything they could by simply participating in curbside single-sort recycling efforts in the city or county where they live.
“So it’s not five percent of what’s coming to our facility that’s getting recycled,” said Hoffman. “It’s five percent of all the plastic that’s out there in the world.”
She said that’s because so many of the plastic products we use every day simply can not be recycled like water bottles, yogurt containers, milk jugs, and laundry detergent bottles can be.
“It is alarming and it does point to the fact that recycling is not the answer for plastic,” she said. “We need to reduce it. We need to use less of it. We need to stop making single-use junk out of precious fossil fuels. Individual action can only take us so far. We’ve got to have systems change and policy change and redesign. It makes a big difference.”
