In Durham, the Journey of a Plastic Bottle

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.

For many residents, that process goes on unseen, fueling a persistent doubt: Does recycling actually work, or is it all getting thrown away?

The confusion starts with a lack of understanding of how Durham handles its waste. 

“Some people still think that there’s a landfill in Durham,” said Muriel Williman, 57, senior assistant solid waste manager for disposal. “There isn’t.”

Durham’s landfill closed in 1994, and the city has not landfilled its waste locally since then. Instead, it operates a transfer system in which both trash and recycling are collected curbside, brought to the Club Boulevard facility and loaded into larger trailers for transport. Trash is sent to a landfill in Sampson County, while recycling is sent to a materials recovery facility in Raleigh, where it is sorted and sold.

A single recycling truck may stop at 750 to 1,000 Durham homes on a typical route before returning to the waste center. At the transfer station, those smaller loads are combined into larger trailers that can carry up to 26 tons of material, with multiple shipments leaving the site each day for processing facilities outside Durham.

At the Raleigh facility, the sorting process is both mechanical and manual. Materials are spread across conveyor belts and separated by type: magnets pull out steel cans, electrical currents separate aluminum and optical scanners identify plastics. Workers along the line remove contamination by hand. By the end of the process, the materials are compressed into bales—cardboard, paper, metal and plastics—and sold to manufacturers.

“Recycling is not small,” Williman said. “It is a huge industry, and it employs 15,000 people in the private sector.”

But the system depends entirely on what residents put into their blue carts, and that is where it often breaks down.

A common issue is “wish cycling,” the practice of putting items into recycling in the hope that they will be sorted out later. In reality, items that do not belong are pulled off the line and discarded, often after traveling through the system at additional cost.

“The thing is, if they have to sort it out and discard it, guess what? It has to come back here to go to the landfill,” Williman said.

Plastic is one of the biggest sources of confusion. Many items carry the familiar triangle symbol with arrows, leading people to assume they are recyclable. In reality, that symbol identifies the type of plastic resin, not whether it can be processed locally.

Of the seven common plastic types, only certain forms of No. 1 and No. 2 plastics— typically bottles, jugs and tubs—are consistently recyclable in Durham. Items like plastic utensils, Styrofoam containers and small plastic packaging are not accepted, either because they cannot be sorted efficiently or because there is no market for them.

“[Forks] are so small, they’re going to fall through the cracks,” Williman said.

Plastic bags are another major problem. When they enter the system, they wrap around gears and conveyor belts, slowing or stopping the sorting process entirely.

“They tangle the equipment,” she said.

Contamination does more than disrupt operations. “There are workers at these plants and it is a workplace health issue, a workplace safety issue,” Williman said. “Food attracts germs. It attracts vermin.”

Contamination also costs money. Durham pays to transport its recycling, pays fees when loads contain non-recyclable material and pays again to landfill what cannot be processed.

That cost has contributed to skepticism about whether recycling is worth the effort. But according to Williman, the issue is not whether recycling works—it is whether the right materials are being collected.

“The markets are hungry,” she said. “They are hungry for a clean commodity.”

Durham processes about 250,000 tons of municipal solid waste each year, compared with roughly 20,000 tons of recycling.

Durham contracts with Waste Management to process its recycling in Raleigh, where materials are sold to companies across North Carolina and beyond. Plastic bottles may be sent to facilities like Unifi in Winston-Salem, where they are turned into polyester fiber. Scrap metal is sold to companies such as OmniSource, while electronics are sent to recyclers like Powerhouse.

Each material stream has its own market, and those markets require consistency. Mixed or contaminated loads reduce the value of recyclables and, in some cases, make them unusable.

That matters as landfill space shrinks. The landfill Durham relies on in Sampson County has an estimated 20 years of capacity remaining, a timeline that could shorten with population growth or major storms.

Beyond curbside pickup, the Durham facility handles a wide range of materials. Residents can drop off electronics, batteries, scrap metal, cooking oil and textiles for recycling or reuse, as well as hazardous materials like paint and chemicals that must be handled separately.

Most drivers entering the site first pass over a scale, where they are charged by weight if their load includes trash or yard waste. If a load consists entirely of accepted recyclable materials—such as electronics, scrap metal or textiles—drivers can bypass the scale and drop those items off at no charge.

For workers at the facility, the system becomes clearer over time.

“There is so much stuff that can be recycled that I didn’t know until I started working here,” said Randy Goldston, 48, a maintenance assistant at the center. “And then once they start breaking it down, it’s amazing what they actually do with the recycling.”

Goldston said one of the biggest challenges is awareness.

“It’s like a whole bunch of people ain’t got knowledge of it,” he said.

For residents, the takeaway is less about doing more and more about doing it correctly: keeping materials clean, avoiding plastic bags and sticking to the short list of accepted items.

“When in doubt, throw it out,” Williman said. “But I’d also say, when in doubt, check out the Waste Wizard online.”

Residents can also track their collection days through Durham Rollout, an app that shows pickup schedules, sends notifications and includes a searchable waste database.

Back in the transfer bay, another load arrives, spilling across the concrete floor as the loader moves into place again. The system keeps moving, steady and mechanical. What happens next depends on what shows up in the pile—a decision made much closer to home than many people think.

“The list is short,” Williman said. “It doesn’t have to be complicated.”

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