People once sorted their recyclables themselves, separating materials like paper and aluminum cans into separate bins. But now most communities in the U.S. use single-stream recycling. This allows residents to toss all their recyclables into a single large container to get sorted later at the recycling plant.
Recycling has changed a lot in the past 20 years, says Jill Martin. She’s the director of state programs for The Recycling Partnership, a nonprofit that focuses on building a better recycling system in the U.S. “We have much more advanced equipment in recycling facilities,” she says. “We can use that to sort out the various materials.”
The country’s recycling rate is now 34 percent, so one-third of all material thrown out is recycled. But new high-tech facilities could help raise that number. One of the newest that just opened in 2023 is The Exchange in Chicago. It’s projected to process up to
224 million pounds of recyclables each year!
Using a series of discs, magnets, and scanners, as well as artificial intelligence (AI) and human workers, materials-recovery facilities do all the sorting—so you don’t have to!