Everyday, our recycled trash is handled in a systematic way to keep our lives in order. These images show the people and scenes from that daily system of pick-up, sorting, diverting, bundling and shipment of our recyclable trash to be re-used for new products. Make no mistake, the trash you throw "away" never goes away. Instead, it is touched and sorted by human hands, only to be channeled to another place - sometimes the landfill - but if we are lucky, it makes its way into a new form to be re-imagined, re-manufactured, re-purposed, and re-used.

Click on each image for a larger view. (MRF = Materials Recovery Facility)

1. Recycled pick-up at your home.

2. Each truck driver receives their daily route. Everyday, trucks are covering the city.

3. These guys are professional and dedicated to this public work.

4. A view from the truck cab on a typical pick-up day.

5. For each can, there is a practiced dance of controls to grab, lift, dump, and set down our garbage bins.

6. Trucks must travel to dump their load up to 3 times a day, depending on how quickly their truck fills up.

7. Once deposited by the pick-up trucks, a front loader shovels mounds of recycled trash and loads it onto the MRF conveyor belt to begin the sorting process.

8. Multiples of workers stand at the conveyor at various points, sorting particular materials depending on the point in the conveyor's journey through the MRF.

9. Workers are subject to vertigo because the conveyor moves so fast.

10. Most MRF workers are female, this fellow sorts some of the larger objects that first emerge on the MRF conveyor.

11. Workers must wear protection on their hands and arms because they never know what they might be grabbing.

12. The system of sorting is redundant, so that materials are able to be properly, and thoroughly sorted.

13. The machinery is supposed to sort out glass since it is heavier, but because we citizens leave liquid in our plastic bottles, this women sorts all the plastics out that have fallen into the glass conveyor. She also sorts all the glass by color. She is called "octopus arms"!

14. One category for sorting is colored plastics. This shows the colorful array of plastic bottles making it's way on the conveyor for the final sorting before bundling.

15. The sorted cardboards - known as "fibers" - spills onto the final conveyor on its way to bundling.

16. Giant 1000 lb. bundles are made from the sorted materials and "weeded", so that they are as pure as possible to the material that is supposed to be in that particular bundle.

17. The bundles, which are actually sold as a commodity on the world market, are stacked and then moved by material type into cargo boxes, then weighed and sent on their way.

18. The cargo boxes will be trucked to Los Angeles, then shipped to Asia for remanufacturing. Who knows if you might use it all over again!