Here at Devens Recycling Center a passion for preserving our environment and a commitment to future generations is the central theme of our Company’s Corporate Culture.  We were determined to create and develop a valuable educational program for young people who share our passion for recycling and as a result, we established our internship program as a way to demonstrate our focus on tomorrow’s leaders. 

This year we have been fortunate to have one outstanding candidate enrolled in the program.  We invite you to take a moment to meet our intern.

Jake Czaja
Hi, my name is Jake Czaja, and I am 20 years old. I am currently majoring in Physics at Cornell College in Iowa. I became interested in materials management, waste handling and recycling initiatives during my high years when I worked for a local park maintenance department during my summer vacations. The majority of the work we did involved cleaning and collecting debris from neighborhood parks.

Over time, I realized that our recycling efforts were undermined because all the debris was considered trash and transferred to the area landfill. This is not the case at Devens Recycling Center. So far my experience at DRC has been very eye-opening.

I have learned many things through hands-on situations and have experienced on how the recycling facility operates. The process is more involved than I ever expected. I have come to understand and appreciate how interrelated the recycling process is from a machinery perspective, a continuously functioning communications system, labor staffing matrixes and coordination of the flow between inbound and outbound materials.

The best part of my internship is the opportunity to witness and participate in the various aspects of the daily operations at the facility. Through this experience, I have observed what is currently being done in the industry and I can set my imagination to what can still be accomplished to make the recycling industry even more effective and efficient. With that being said, I can clearly see myself getting more involved with recycling in the future.

There are still many areas in the process for study and advancement. I believe these to include educating the public/customers about recycling, impacting the physical environments of the facilities, developing more sophisticated products utilizing the recycled materials and perhaps most interesting to me engineering more efficient machinery and implementing innovative technology to increase recycling capabilities. I feel it is by far the most crucial element considering the scale of recycling today, to have technically advanced machinery capable of sorting and recycling the waste stream.

I see the future having enormous possibilities for improving the quantity and quality of material that is currently being recycled.