Recycle your Styrofoam at the special DPW event.
The Watertown Department of Public Work’s recycling event scheduled for this weekend has been postponed until Feb. 10, 2018.
Collect all your unwanted styrofoam and tires, and dispose of it at an event hosted by the Watertown Department of Public Works.
The DPW sent out the following information:
On Feb. 10, 2018 there will be a recycle event at the Watertown Recycle Center, 76 Stanley Ave., Watertown, MA (off of Waltham Street). See the map below.
There will be Styrofoam and Tire Collection (NO RIMS) and Paper Shredding from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Thanks for offering this important opportunity to keep styrofoam and tires out of landfills. I have a few questions – (I’m doing research for a children’s book on styrofoam)
1. What do you do with the styrofoam once your organization collects it?
2. What was the biggest reason you collect styrofoam separately?
Any help you can provide on this will be GREATLY appreciated.
Expanded polystyrene foam (EPS) (Styrofoam is a specific manufacturer’s brand name) consists of plastic beads filled with a gas, usually pentane (a hydrocarbon).
EPS requires specialized equipment to compress the material and remove the gas from inside the beads. The process used to recycle other types of household plastics during single-stream recycling cannot handle EPS, so if you put EPS (i.e. Styrofoam) into your single-stream recycling bin, it must be manually removed and disposed of as trash, which slows down the automated sorting process and adds cost.
Because EPS (Styrofoam) cannot be collected in the green single-stream recycling bins, the Town of Watertown has a vendor with the specialized equipment come twice a year to collect EPS at the recycling center.
Once the EPS has been compressed with the gas removed, it can be sold by the recycler as high-density polystyrene to manufacture other plastic products.