Trucks carry your recyclables to enormous facilities that can be as large as four football fields! There, the waste moves along conveyor belts as machines and people work together to sort the items. At the end, bundled items are ready to be turned into something new. Here’s how one of these facilities, called the Exchange, in Chicago, Illinois, works.

Trucks dump recyclables in the delivery area, where they get shoved onto a conveyor belt.

Items move along the belt. Workers remove nonrecyclable trash—like shoes and plastic bags—that could jam the machines.

Rows of spinning rubber discs push large pieces of cardboard over the top. Smaller objects, like bottles and cans, fall to a lower level for further sorting.

Screens separate paper products from bottles, jars, and cans. Those containers fall through. Paper continues on to be sorted.

Paper is separated into three groups: office paper, newspaper, and mixed paper, like magazines.

A strong spinning magnet lifts steel objects off the conveyor belt and drops the steel into a container.

A set of turning discs breaks glass recyclables. The pieces fall into a container.

A machine creates an electric current, or flow of electricity, that launches aluminum cans over a gap in the conveyor belt. Plastic items fall through the gap.

A scanner shoots a beam of infrared light, low-energy light invisible to humans, to identify the different types of plastic. A jet of air shoots lightweight plastics that are easier to recycle (those with a 1 or 2) onto a separate conveyor belt.

Last, each sorted material goes through a machine called a baler. The baler tightly packs the recyclables into solid rectangular bricks. Companies can buy the bales and use them to make new goods.