This story originally published in The 9th Street Journal.
Inside a concrete bay at Durham’s Waste Disposal and Recycling Center on East Club Boulevard, a plastic water bottle lands with a dull crack against a pile of cardboard and glass, quickly swallowed into a growing heap of mixed material.
Within minutes, a front-end loader scoops it up and drops it into a steel trailer that will be hauled to a sorting facility in Raleigh. If the bottle is clean and correctly sorted, it may be shredded, melted and turned into fiber for clothing or carpeting…