You can't recycle a bowling ball, but people keep trying...
No, You Can’t Recycle a Bowling Ball (But People Sure Keep Trying) - Why do 1,200 balls end up at New York City’s main recycling plant each year?
Every day, collection trucks from Brooklyn and barges from Queens and the Bronx arrive at Sims Municipal Recycling in Sunset Park, loaded up with old phone books and plastic sporks, metal faucets and glass bottles. It’s the country’s largest recycling facility of its kind, sorting more than 1,000 tons of New York City’s metal, glass, plastic, and paper each day on 2.4 miles of conveyor belt. Head into Tom Outerbridge’s office at Sims, and you’ll also see a few discarded bowling balls, lined up and ready to roll.
When Outerbridge, who is the facility’s general manager, started at Sims more than 15 years ago, he started rescuing the wayward balls. He very quickly discovered that he could not keep up, because Sims gets an average of three to four bowling balls a day, or roughly 1,200 per year. It was like “walk[ing] on the beach for the first time,” Outerbridge says, “and you’re like, ‘Oh, look at this shell, it’s amazing!’ before you realize there are shells everywhere.”
The Technicolor spheres arrive at Sims in the same plastic bags with all the soda bottles and soup cans, picked up curbside all over the city. People seem to think that because they are plastic, they are the same as, say, takeout containers. They are not. Breaking bowling balls apart and selling the individual components for scrap isn’t logistically or economically feasible — and so they end up in the approximately 20 percent of material that Sims sends on to landfills.
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https://www.curbed.com/2021/06/recyc...alls-sims.html