No, You Can’t Recycle a Bowling Ball (But People Sure Keep Trying)

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2021-06-30 02:00:07

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Every day, collection trucks from Brooklyn and barges from Queens and the Bronx arrive at Sims Municipal Recycling in Sunset Park, loaded up with old phone books and plastic sporks, metal faucets and glass bottles. It’s the country’s largest recycling facility of its kind, sorting more than 1,000 tons of New York City’s metal, glass, plastic, and paper each day on 2.4 miles of conveyor belt. Head into Tom Outerbridge’s office at Sims, and you’ll also see a few discarded bowling balls, lined up and ready to roll.

When Outerbridge, who is the facility’s general manager, started at Sims more than 15 years ago, he started rescuing the wayward balls. He very quickly discovered that he could not keep up, because Sims gets an average of three to four bowling balls a day, or roughly 1,200 per year. It was like “walk[ing] on the beach for the first time,” Outerbridge says, “and you’re like, ‘Oh, look at this shell, it’s amazing!’ before you realize there are shells everywhere.”