- A lot of the produce and other products we bring home from the grocery store come in containers made of plastic and other recyclable materials.

(items clattering) Now, a lot of us are pretty diligent about recycling, but if you're like me, you probably wonder, "How much of this stuff we put into these blue bins actually gets recycled?"

The short answer is we have room for improvement, according to sustainability expert and IIT Professor Weslynne Ashton.

- Chicago has one of the lowest recycling rates of cities across the country, right?

So we hover around 10%.

- But for the 10% of us who do recycle, the sorting process is amazing.

It happens at a MRF, that's short for materials recovery facility.

This MRF is owned and operated by LRS in Chicago's Back of the Yards neighborhood.

(machinery whirring) So if it goes into a blue cart in Chicago, it ends up here.

- Yes, we take in recycling and we sort it into isolated materials or isolated commodities that we can then market to mills and factories across North America.

And so really, we are the sorter instead of the recycler.

It gets recycled in the next phase when we get it to the factory.

- And sorting is a very big job because recycling truck drivers dump their haul in one big pile on the MRF's tipping floor.

To start the process, an electric crane driver scoops up a giant gob of unsorted recycling and drops it on a conveyor belt.

Sustainability manager Joy Rifkin meets us at the top to start our tour.

It's so noisy here that Joy, who's a former school teacher, uses an old classroom trick: visual aids.

At this first step, materials begin to be separated by a rather ingenious spinning spiral thingamajig called an auger screen, where heavy materials like glass and metal drop through, and lighter materials like paper and cardboard surf over the top.

And that's just the start.

So what's that doing?

- It's separating two dimensional from three-dimensional materials.

(machinery whirring) - Steel cans are sorted magnetically.

Most amazing is an optical scanner that identifies material at high speed and then injects puffs of air to send lighter materials up to one sorting area, while heavier materials fall down to another.

Somebody's math homework is in there.

Really?

- Yeah!

Looks like geometry.

- Leave it to a former school teacher to spot that.

For all the computers and scanners, a lot of this process still requires human power, especially because other humans put stuff in blue bins that doesn't belong there, like plastic bags, which get caught in the machinery and jam up the works.

I can't even sort my laundry.

I can't get the darks and the lights separate.

- I know, it's hard.

- [Geoffrey] Sorter Cynthia Torres says plastic bags aren't the only thing she worries about.

(Cynthia speaking Spanish) - A car jack?

No.

Once materials are sifted and sorted, they end up in these massive bales, where they await loading into buyers' trucks.

And this is aluminum?

- This is aluminum.

We also have- - Somebody's White Claw hard ale there.

- Right, is that yours?

- No, I don't think so.

So how much will actually get recycled?

- On average, 80% of what's coming into this facility is getting recycled.

- [Geoffrey] But not all facilities can match that.

- Where the challenge comes is with plastic.

So the recycled plastics compete against virgin plastic that's produced from oil.

- When oil prices are low, there's less demand for recyclable plastics, so it can languish in storage, be burned as fuel, or even go to a landfill.

We might not be able to control the market for plastic, but we can still make better use of those blue bins.

(Cynthia speaking Spanish) - I think there's a lot of hope for recycling in Chicago, right?

At 10%, we can only go up.

(gentle music)