This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

Here, let me give you these.

Oh, thank you. These are your plugs.

Let me take you back, back to a simpler time.

The year 2016.

What is this?

So this is Recycling Plant. This is the large recycling plant.

Where we sort all the materials from the blue bin, the bottles, the cans, the paper.

In 2016, producer Avery Trollfeman was working on a story about garbage and recycling pickup

systems its episode 2.13. But don't worry, this is not a rerun. This story is different.

Back then, for that story in 2016, I took a tour of the plant that sorts all of San Francisco's

recycling.

We do 600 tons a day here.

That's Robert Reed, the representative for San Francisco Recology, which is the company

that is responsible for San Francisco's recycling program.

There are trucks round up all the recycling around the city and bring it to a Merf.

Merf, MRF, a materials recovery facility.

At the Merf, the trucks dump all the recycling into a big mountain. And then the wild part

begins.

This particular Merf in San Francisco has all this elaborate machinery that looks like

it's out of a Miyazaki movie.

You see a recycling superstructure. It's three stories high. Pretty shortly. It can

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