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Reply to "Can you recycle Lionel FasTrack?"

Even if you strip the metal from the plastic roadbed, it may or may not be recyclable depending on your municipal or regional recycling systems. The New England town I used to live in would take any and all types of metals, including scrap, nails, screws, bottle caps -- you name it. It would be trucked away and the ferrous/non-ferrous bits would get sorted out in bulk, and the rest would get sent to another stream for further processing. Where I live now in the Midwest, the official county recycling initiative will only accept marked and commonly-known containers for recycling -- basically just cans and tins. Scrap metal and small bits aren't accepted. I don't have municipal trash pickup where I live, so I have to use a pickup service by default. The one I use processes everything they pick up for recycling, at least, so what I can't send to the county (basically rinsed food containers and cardboard/paper) is sent given a once-over by the trash service, which will at least get the metal out for recycling if nothing else.

The town in New England used to require plastic to be sorted by labeling and they'd try to sell it off to recyclers, but at some point the bottom fell out of that and they just sent it along with the general trash to the incinerator on the other end of town. At least the incinerator provided supplementary power generation from trash and it cut back on the volume going to landfills. Where I live now, everything not easily recyclable (and probably quite a bit that may be) is getting stuffed in landfills. Not the best of situations.

So basically where FasTrack is concerned, you might be able to separate the metal and get it into the recycling stream, but the plastic is either getting incinerated (and hopefully getting converted into some electrons to run some trains...) or it's going into a landfill.

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