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AUGUST 30, 2019 FREE
To recycle or not to recycle? Most residents don’t know the answer, and that’s causing soaring costs By MicHele alPerin
Nick Cherukuri, CEO of West Windsor-based ThirdEye Gen, wears his company’s augmented reality X2 smart glasses.
A dose of (augmented) reality Company looks to market headset for use in businesses By Diccon Hyatt It turns out there are at least three types of reality. There’s standard reality, which many people are familiar with, and then there’s virtual reality, which you can inhabit by wearing a VR headset of some sort. When you put on a VR
headset, the sights and sounds of the real world are blocked out completely, totally immersing you in a computer-generated experience. Movies, video games, and harder-to-define experimental experiences are available to anyone who wants to venture into a virtual world. Escaping into virtual space is becoming increasingly popular, and sales of VR units grow every year. The manufacturers of VR headsets, led by Sony Playstation VR, Oculus Rift, and HTC,
together sold around 6 million headsets last year. But there is a third type of reality that has proved commercially elusive so far: mixed reality or augmented reality. This type of headset seeks to enhance the real world rather than block it out, and it has proved so far to be resistant to commercialization. But a West Windsor company, ThirdEye Gen, is betting that it has cracked the code with its X2 smart glasses. Unlike VR, which See THIRDEYE, Page 6
Since 1987, New Jersey state law has mandated recycling, but Mercer County residents can’t seem to figure out what is recyclable and what isn’t. The result has been increasingly contaminated containers and huge increases in recycling costs. The issue is statewide, and local towns are no exception. According to Chris Rupp, director of public works for Robbinsville Township, the town’s recycling costs “have doubled from $125,000 per year to $250,000 per year.” Dan Napoleon, director of environmental programs at the Mercer County Improvement Authority, says that the cost per household per year now averages around $29, which generates large bills in populous towns. The major change on the recycling scene, says Frank Fiumefreddo of Solterra Recycling Solutions, is that “the quality of the material we were shipping overseas had gotten to a point that it was unacceptable.” As a result, in 2018, China lowered the minimum allowable percentage of contamination in recycling, throwing the entire recycling industry into
crisis. Solterra is the contracted hauler for curbside recycling in Robbinsville and towns served by the Mercer County Improvement Authority, including West Windsor. “They went from maybe five percent, and the new standard was they would not accept any material with greater than onehalf of one percent contamination,” Napoleon says. “We saw a 40 percent increase in collection costs as a result.” Because the biggest contributors to contamination of the recycling stream are plastic bags and pizza boxes, Robbinsville and the Mercer County Improvement Authority are focusing on them in campaigns to reeducate consumers on the how-to’s of recycling. Plastic bags and any items inside them go directly into the trash at the processing plant. “It could be 100 percent clean recycling, but it is not opened at the facility,” Napoleon says. Plastic bags that make their way to the sorting line can jam up the sorting machinery and must be removed by hand, which increases costs. Pizza boxes are rejected because any oil that has seeped into the cardboard will remain part of the paper fibers when they get to the pulping process. Misconceptions abound, and they often come with justifications. “Some residents think they are doing the right thing by putting the recycling in a bag See RECYCLE, Page 8
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