The production of human waste increases year by year. This vast amount of trash has formed islands hundreds of thousands of miles long in the oceans. There is so much litter that ends up in the oceans and on land that it has entered the food chain, greatly damaging biodiversity.

One way to reduce the amount of human waste is recycling in recycling centers; by lengthening the useful life of materials and preventing them from ending up in landfills, but also avoiding the production of new materials and thereby avoiding the over-exploitation of raw materials and the pollution that comes with the extraction of materials and their production.

The waste that can be recycled has different destinations depending on the material in question. The waste that we deposit in the recyclable container is taken by dedicated recycling trucks to the Materials Recovery Facility (MRF). In these recycling centers, the waste is separated and later packed in bundles.

The waste that is not received by the recycling centers, such as plastic bags, electronic devices, or clothing (which vary in each locality and each recycling center) must be taken directly by the consumers to specific collection points so that these can be recycled.

Once separated and packaged, the recyclable materials are sent to recycling plants or processing factories that turn the waste into new products.

Recyclable waste that is not separated in the recycling container or is not taken to collection points, ends up in landfills, where, depending on its material, it can take hundreds of years to degrade or even never do so.

In the United States, only 10% of recyclable waste reaches the transformation stage, and most of it is destined for sale abroad.

Recycling is the process by which the raw materials that make up the waste that we use daily such as paper, glass, aluminum, plastic, etc., are transformed into new materials. This prevents these wastes from entering the seas or earth. But, for this to happen, a series of steps need to be carried out:

• At home – separate and clean waste.
• At local recycling centers – sort, pack, and store, for later sale.
• At processing industries – treat the materials and transform them into new products.

For a few years, the United States entered a crisis due to the accumulation of waste, which was triggered by the new waste policies of China, which was the main buyer of waste in the United States. These new policies are much stricter and among other restrictions, they lowered the minimum standards for pollutants to -1%, which excludes the majority of waste from the United States.

Not all the containers we consume are recyclable, even those that may seem so, that is why sometimes the local recycling center does not accept all the waste we carry. For example, while plastic bottles are the most widely recycled plastic products, not all bottles are made from the same plastic and their acceptance varies depending on the capabilities of each local recycling center.

In addition, the recycling services can reject your waste for recycling because it is dirty or contaminated since this means that it can no longer be recycled. Another reason facilities may reject materials is because of their shape, since some objects can damage the machinery, such as hooks. Other items that you cannot deposit in the recycling centers are:

• Syringes
• Bowling balls
• Aerosol cans that are not empty
• Plastic bags
• Batteries
• Diapers
• Electronics
• Ceramics

In the United States, there are 633 material recycling centers. In these local recycling centers, the waste we generate is stored, and that has the capacity to be recycled so that other people or companies can take advantage of it. Waste that is not recycled takes many years to decompose, which pollutes and harms the health of humans and the earth.

In this sense, recycling centers are very important in the fight against environmental pollution, since they can clean, classify and pack a total of 100,000 tons of waste per day. However, the recycling centers cannot do all the work, the waste must have a correct treatment from the consumer, who must separate and clean the waste so that it can be classified correctly in the center and later sent to factories for transformation or processors.