Thanks to university sustainability initiatives, all rooms on campus are equipped with recycling and trashcans. Every week, residents in halls across NAU take their garbage out and dump it into large, brown and green trash containers.

Yet while most students’ involvement in recycling ends at these garbage receptacles, this is only the beginning for those involved in the trash-sorting business. One such location — and the first stop for Flagstaff’s recyclable trash — is the Materials Recovery Facility operated by Norton Environmental, Inc.

Elsbeth Inglett, an instructor for the Willow Bend Environmental Education Center and the guide on the tour of the facility, said calling the building a recycling center is a misnomer, as it does not actually do much recycling itself.

“No recycling is actually done here,” Inglett said. “There’s actually a first step. Step No. 1 — before you start recycling anything, everything goes into one bin, right? Can you recycle your papers and plastics together? No, so this actually a sorting facility. All of the recycling comes here from Williams, the Grand Canyon and basically all of northern Arizona. It all comes here and gets sorted, and then it goes to recycling centers. Paper, for instance, will be packed up and sent down to Snowflake, where they actually do paper recycling. Our plastic and metal goes down to Phoenix right now.”

Inglett said both dumps and landfills had their faults, but the latter — especially in Flagstaff’s case — can allow chemicals to seep into the earth and water table while preventing materials within from decomposing.

“Dumps are constantly decomposing — as we fill them up, they’re going down,” Inglett said. “Landfills are much more labor-intensive. We dig a huge hole in the ground as big as a square block. Now, most of the times — and it’s not mandatory — there is a huge lining that goes in that hole. Now, our landfill does not have that rubber lining. What would that rubber lining prevent? Water pollution and soil contamination. We don’t have that — Cinder Lake Landfill does not have that.”

Flagstaff residents, Inglett said, are essentially taking expensive steps to preserve their trash by utilizing the landfill method of waste disposal.

“A lot of people would think things decompose in there because we put layers of dirt,” Inglett said. “But it’s basically like putting all of our trash into a giant Ziplock bag or a plastic container and putting it in the freezer.”

In a 2007 report prepared by the Merriam-Powell Center for Environmental Research at NAU, an inspection and examination of the waste sent by NAU in 2007 revealed university students sent 1,655 tons — of which 960 tons could have been recycled — to Cinder Lake Landfill every year.

Northern Arizona has a different approach to recycling glass, which is the only official recycling that occurs within the facility. Inglett said because the cost of shipping it to California would be expensive, discarded glass will get a new life as what it began: sand.

“Glass is not recycled here in Flagstaff,” Inglett said. “We do something else with it, and what we do is we actually return it back to what it started as — sand. So, all the glass gets collected and brought here. We wash it down, turn it back into sand, and it’s free for public use. There’s a loss of money if we were to recycle it — the nearest recycling facility for glass is in Los Angeles. If you’ve ever picked up a box of glass bottles, it’s heavy. To ship all of our glass to Los Angeles would cost a lot of money. So, instead, we don’t. Instead of throwing it into a landfill, we use it in another way.”

In the back lot of the facility, a large pile of glass refuse sat next to a machine designed to grind and crush it down to a fine, semi-lustrous material. Within the building, bulldozers pushed a generalized pile of trash onto a conveyor belt, carrying it up to two sorting rooms raised above the floor. Through openings in the ceiling, workers divided the trash into piles that other bulldozers put in a compactor, turning the recyclable material into large blocks for easier transit.

Currently, the Materials Recovery Facility accepts paper, glass, metals and ‘hard’ plastics (such as milk containers). They cannot take organic materials, Styrofoam, used papers (tissues) or ‘soft’ plastics (grocery bags).

As a part of the initiative they are calling “Green First Fridays,” Willow Bend will be hosting tours of the Norton Environmental sorting center on the first Friday of every month from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. The facility is located at 1800 E. Butler Ave.