Name: Oren Casriel
Social Justice Group: 2022-2023, Environment: Microplastics
Date of Fieldwork: February 15, 2023
Name of Organization and person (people) with whom you met and their title(s):SIMS Recycling Center | Karen Napolitano | education and outreach coordinator of SIMS Recycling Center
Type of Fieldwork: Tour of Organization
What I did and what I learned about my topic, activism, social justice work or civil and human rights work from this fieldwork?:
Karen Napolitano, who is the education and outreach coordinator of SIMS Recycling Center met us at the front entrance and showed us around. We saw a presentation where I learned that the statistic, “only 9% of plastic that is produced is actually recycled” is misleading because it accounts for plastics that are usually reused like toilet seats and printers. We also learned that the reason that they don’t recycle certain plastics is because the companies that buy the materials don’t want them. The companies only want hard plastic so all of the soft plastic that get recycled just go to landfill.
When we first got into the building, we went through a sort of museum that had all of the different processes that are used in recycling on a smaller scale so that you could see and understand them close up. Probably the most fun one was the manual sorting station where someone would turn a conveyor belt and you would have to sort different items into different categories, metal, paper, and plastic. It put into perspective how hard it is to work a job like recycling and it made me appreciate the people who do it even more.
Then came when we actually got to see the real machines and they were really cool. There was so many different conveyor belts and it was cool to see all of the different processes that we explored on a miniature scale in real life. There was a front loader that was moving a ton of trash around and it was really cool to just watch it. On the way out we saw all of the different bales of plastic stacked on top of another and there was so much plastic just in that pile that it put into perspective how much plastic we use every day just in NYC.
