Do you wonder where your recycling goes once your blue bin is emptied at the curb?

Do you wonder what your recycling is made into?

Read on! This section describes what happens when we harvest the rich urban forest...

The City has a contract with a local firm, F.W. Russell & Sons to collect recycling from over 45,000 households, about 100 non-profit organizations and our schools and city buildings. Russell sends out five recycling trucks daily and from April-December, one truck for yard waste collection. The recycling trucks are divided into two different compartments: one for commingles (glass, plastic and metal containers) and one for paper and cardboard.

When the truck is full, Russell brings the material to FCR-Boston, a processing plant 2.5 miles from Cambridge in Charlestown where the material gets weighed, sorted and baled. About 150 recycling trucks dump material at the facility daily from about 50 communities in the Boston area.

At FCR-Boston, the processing of recyclables is assisted by advanced sorting technology. In addition, recycling processing is labor intensive. This reinforces the importance of properly preparing your recycling!

None of the recyclable containers are washed at the processing facility, so dirty recyclables are considered trash. If a recycling truck is mixed or contains trash, the entire load can be rejected leading to additional processing costs and more material sent to landfill or incinerators. This is why it is important that you rinse out jars, cans and tubs so that the materials are free from food. In addition, it is equally important to keep your papers separate from your containers since the truck has separate compartments and they are going to different sorting areas in the recycling processing facility.

About 500 tons of paper is processed each day. While the paper and cardboard move along the conveyor belt, electronic eyes and then people separate the material into difference "grades" and remove contaminants. For example, pizza boxes are considered a contaminant because of the grease and food residue. You can recycle pizza boxes if you rip off the greasy parts and put it inside out in a paper bag, so it no longer looks like a pizza box.

On another conveyor, as the commingled containers flow along, metals are yanked out from overhead magnets and propelled into a holding area. Broken glass and bottle caps shake out and fall onto a lower conveyor for further processing.

The remaining material: plastics, aluminum and milk cartons are blown around by air jets strategically placed to push and draw light materials over to a manual sorting conveyor. Glass containers travel onto another conveyor where the clear containers are separated from the colored glass.

Once everything is thoroughly sorted, the material is baled separately. Huge bales of plastics, metals, paper and cardboard are stacked up in the facility and await loading into export containers, trailers and rail cars for direct shipment to companies that use the material to make new products.

Each month, FCR-Boston provides the City a monthly market report listing where the destinations for each recyclable material. Although demand for the material and the end markets fluctuate, the end destinations are relatively constant. In the table below, you can see who picks up your recycling, what company processes it, its general end destination and what products are made from the material you have recycled.