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

Here let me give you these.

Oh, thank you.

These are ear plugs.

Let me take you back, back to a simpler time, the year 2016.

What is this?

So this is Recycle Central.

This is the large recycling plant where we sort all the materials from the blue band, the bottles, the cans of the paper.

In 2016, producer Avery Trofelman was working on a story about garbage and recycling pickup systems.

It's episode 213.

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.

Their trucks round up all the recycling around the city

and bring it to a Murf.

Murf, MRF, a materials recovery facility.

...