Hey, friends.

I'm Cody Kelly.

Today, we're here at the Conway Department of Sanitation.

This is where we house both the recycling and our landfill.

Over the next few minutes, you're going to have the opportunity to learn exactly what happens to both your recycling and your garbage once it leaves your curb.

Hey, everybody.

So now we have made our way down to what we call the Merph.

This is a materials recovery facility.

We're here today with Mr. Adam how are you doing, Adam?

I'm doing great.. How are you doing?

Awesome.

Thank you for having us here in your building.

Now, I'm looking back behind us.

I see some giant equipment.

Can you tell us a little bit about what's going on back here?

Yeah.

So for our city, all of our material that is recyclable comes in and is dumped in the floor right here.

And this giant machine you see behind us sorts all that material out in individual products.

Very cool.

So you say individual product.

What all kind of products can we take in here?

So here in Conway, we can recycle paper, we can recycle cardboard, we can recycle plastic, number one and number two bottles and jugs, aluminum cans.

We can recycle steel cans in our single stream.

Very cool.

So once we separate it all out, then what happens to it?

So once we separate it out, we can actually bale it up with our baler into individual products.

And from there we can load it on a truck and send it out to the manufacturers to be made in a new products.

So we can take our old products and actually make new products out of them.

Absolutely.

That's awesome.

So can you tell us exactly why this recycling is so important to our city?

Yeah, we're running out of places to put landfills.

It takes a large area of land to put a landfill.

And so with us running out of places to put it, it's really important for us to try to extend the life of the landfill that we have.

And in doing recycling, we're able to do that.

So very, very important to a city.

Now, last thing, people that want to get into recycling, can you give us any tips or anything, anything we might need to know about it?

It's really important to know what your city accepts in their recycling stream.

You don't want to put things in there that they're going to have to spend time and labor pulling out.

You don't want to put trash in your recycling because it actually contaminates the end product and makes it less recyclable.

Well, Mr. Adams, thank you so much for having us here in your facility.

Now, friends, it's time to make our way down to the landfill All right, everybody.

So we have now made our way up here on top of the landfill.

It looks like a mountain almost.

And we're up here with Mr. James.

James, how are you doing?

Pretty good.

Well, thank you so much for having us up here on your landfill.

Driving up, we noticed all these big machines pushing things around.

Can you tell us a little bit about what's happening, what's going on right here behind us?

Well, there are compacting waste.

We dump it out on the ground and these machines push it up and compact it.

So when you say compact, exactly what does that mean?

Well, that big yellow machine rattler is about 70,000 pounds.

And that's all he does all day is packs that waste to save air space.

Now, James, one of the biggest things I notice is looking around, I see some animals around.

I see some greenery.

This doesn't look like anything I would think of as a landfill.

What are some of the things we're doing to protect the environment here at the landfill?

Well, we keep our litter fences up, which is just chicken wire on a T-post.

And that does a pretty good job of catching anything, keeping it from from leaving our site here.

And we do have to have a certain percentage of our landfill that's green.

The vegetation keeps our soil from washing away.

And we have a sedimentation pond.

Any time it rains, you know, anything that lands on this particular site here runs into that pond.

And we, you know, we test it before we turn it loose.

Wow.

So how much garbage comes up here?

You notice a lot of trucks are just coming in one after another.

Do you know how much comes in a day?

Yes sir, we're going to take a 250 tons on average in a day.

250 tons a day.

That's almost as much as a blue whale weighs.

How much more time can we be dumping garbage up here?

Well, we're about 52 years.

This is what we got left.

52 more years.

Now, how long has it, have we been going so far?

25 years, I believe.

When they first designed this landfill, it was just supposed to last 20 years, and now we're to 52 years.

So that's a lot of that is due to recycling.

All right, friends.

Now we can see just how important the recycling is.

It helps us keep all kinds of different materials out of our landfill and extend the life of it.

So if you can, definitely be sure to do your part and help us recycle.

So, friends, today we have been touring the Conway Department of Sanitation.

We've seen our Murph, which is our recycling facility.

We've seen our landfill.

Most importantly, we've learned exactly why recycling is so important.

So if you want to help out the environment, call your city or your recycling provider.

Figure out what items you can recycle locally and start recycling.

Help out the environment.