You're blue-bin. Think it's just another place to put your household waste? Think again. The things you put in this blue-bin are actually valuable resources that are about to embark on an amazing journey we call recycling. This plastic bottle, when it falls into the bin, it's about to take a magic carpet ride to a new life. It could become another bottle or something like this leaf. This is the first stop on the journey. CSWD's materials recovery facility or Merf for short. Thanks to you, more than 80 million pounds of recyclables are processed in this building each year. They go through a wild series of spinning discs, speeding conveyor belts, whirling magnets. It's sort of like a Willy Wonka factory for recyclables. When they come out the other side, they're shipped off to market to be made into new products. Trucks come into this building. We call it the tip floor. That's because this is where trucks literally tip their recyclables out onto the floor. It can look like quite a mess, but that's only because the Merf hasn't worked its magic yet. Another machine, a skid steer or a loader, pushes it all onto the first conveyor belt, where it heads up the hill and into the pre-sort room. The pre-sort room is where the first line of workers take off bags of shredded paper for special handling. They also take out items that made it into your bin by mistake, like styrofoam, plastic bags, and hazardous materials. It takes concentration and quick hands, but it's important to get these contaminants out now. Contaminants lower the value of recyclables, and they can get caught into the machinery or even injure workers. Cardboard is the first material to be sorted. A screening machine with spinning discs pulls off big pieces of cardboard while everything else drops through it onto a conveyor below. After the cardboard, glass is next. Your recyclables go through something called a bottle breaker, which does exactly what it sounds like. It crushes glass into small pieces. That crushed glass falls through a screen onto its own special conveyor. The rest of your recyclables are still on the move. They're heading for two more sorting screens. We call paper, like newspaper and office paper, fibers. These items float on top of the screens, while containers, like plastic bottles and metal cans, bounce down the hill. The fibers head for a conveyor where workers pull out box board and cardboard for separate recycling. And they pull off any trash that might have sneaked by the first step. The plastic and metal containers are headed for a special machine called the ballistic screen whose rows of paddle arms weed out any leftover fibers and drop the containers onto their own conveyor. The workers on the next line are looking for plastic containers like jugs, tubs, and bottles. These plastics may end up as plastic or composite lumber, bottle caps, or even fleece sweaters. Each worker on this line is looking for a different type of plastic to sort, and each type of plastic needs to be kept separate. That's because every type of plastic is different. Companies that buy the kind of plastic used in water and soda bottles, for example, don't want other plastics. The color of the plastic can also make a difference. A colorless plastic milk jug is worth more because it can be made into more things than one that has been colored or in your blue. Next up, metal. Ferris metals, or metals with iron in them, are in for a fun ride as a pass under a high-powered electro-magnet, which lifts them off the conveyor and drops them down a chute into a bunker below. The last sort on the line is looking for aluminum. Aluminum cans, aluminum pipe pans, big balls of aluminum foil, and those products will be recycled into just about any other product you can think of made of aluminum. Aluminum siding, engine parts, or another aluminum can. After all, the paper, plastics, and metal are sorted out. They're each bailed into giant cubes that weigh up to 1,700 pounds a piece. These bales will be loaded on the tractor trailer trucks and sold to companies that will recycle them into new products. These bales are worth a lot of money. Summer worth $30. Summer worth more than $700. For each year, the Merf sells an average of $4 million worth of recyclables. But wait, we're not done yet. Remember that bottle breaker? Well, that broken glass took an exciting trip of its own past vacuum, fans, and magnets that picked out any paper, plastic, or metal bits that may have gotten mixed in. The glass then goes through a spinning cylinder called a trommel, and the end product is used in road building projects and in drainage projects. That's the end of this part of the amazing journey we call recycling. If you were a newspaper or a plastic bottle, your journey would have taken you only a half an hour from door to door. If you ever have a question about what you can recycle in Chittanon County, check out our A to Z list on cswd.net or give us a call at 872-8111. Thanks for joining us and your recyclables on this amazing journey. Remember, recycle right so the equipment and people at the Merf can do their job as effectively and safely as possible.