Where Do My Recyclables Go?

Residential Curbside Recycling Materials
Sort No More: Single Stream is at Your Door!
For convenience, the City has implemented "single stream" curbside recycling collection, which allows all recyclable materials to go into your yellow bin.

Once the recyclables are collected from your yellow bin, they are taken to a Single Stream Materials Recycling Facility (MRF) in Elkridge, Maryland.

At the Materials Recycling Facility (MRF), the recyclables are further separated by type: plastics, glass, metal, paper and cardboard. To learn more about how recyclables are sorted, watch this short video from WM Recycle America's Elkridge MRF.

Recycling Drop-off Location Materials
Materials that are brought by community members to the City's four recycling drop-off locations are taken to Capital Fiber to be sorted, processed, and sold to market. These locations do not accept single stream materials. All materials must be placed in the correct container at all City recycling drop-off locations.

Paper from the truck is emptied on to the floor of the facility and pushed on to a conveyor belt. Once on the conveyor belt, the paper is sorted into the different types.	Paper sorting is done by machines and people. Here is a sorting line where the workers are removing trash and other non-recyclable items from all the paper items.
A pile of containers emptied from curbside collection trucks. The containers will be sent on a conveyor belt (right), just like the paper, so that the different types of containers can be separated. Plastics, aluminum and glass are all sorted, and plastics are further sorted by their type.
Materials are separated, with plastic milk jugs and laundry detergents on the left, and aluminum cans on the right.	Glass bottles that were separated from the plastic and aluminum are here on this conveyor belt.
Each type of material is then baled into a large cube (except for glass). These bales of materials are then loaded onto a truck, and then sent to manufacturing plant where the recyclables are used to make new products.
Bales of office paper (with staff standing next to for scale)	Bales of plastic water and soda bottles