After reading the first part of our recycling guide, you’re a sorting expert. You’ve put your pizza box in the paper recycling, almond-milk container in with the metal, plastic and glass, and separated the coffee cup from its lid to recycle both.
But what happens next? Where does New York City’s stuff all go? And what does it become? Let’s get into it.
Two different companies handle the city’s two different recycling streams — paper on one hand, and plastic, glass and metal on the other.
Most of the city’s plastic, metal and glass ends up at Balcones Material Recovery Facility in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, the company that is contracted with the Department of Sanitation to handle that. Balcones also has a Jersey City location that takes a small amount, too.
Paper recycling ends up at the Pratt Industries Paper Mill on Staten Island. It travels there by truck, barge and rail — and some of it makes a first stop at Balcones in Sunset Park.
Before we follow our recyclables from curbside to the smelter, here are answers to THE CITY readers’ most pressing recycling-related questions:
How much of the recycling material that New Yorkers put into recycling bins actually gets recycled?
Much of what you put into the recycling bin is on a path to become other materials, but not all of it.
New York City has long-term contracts with Pratt (at least a decade) and Balcones (two decades) mandating the companies accept recyclable materials and put them to beneficial use. Pratt, as you’ll read more about, does its own recycling and transforms paper into, for instance, cardboard and pizza boxes.
Workers at the Sunset Park recycling center sort plastics, metal and glass, Jan. 15, 2025. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
Balcones sells its processed material to buyers, who then further process it and may sell that to manufacturers, who use it to produce new goods.
Knowing exactly where your recyclables end up is nearly impossible, however. Balcones isn’t required to disclose where the material goes. At that point, it’s beyond DSNY’s purview. But the company makes its revenue from selling valuable, i.e. recyclable, materials and is therefore incentivized to not just trash the stuff (more on this later). After Balcones sells it, the material may change hands multiple times, making it difficult to know exactly what — and how much — is ending up where.
Some stuff that goes into your recycling bins — about 15% of the paper stream and 28% of the metal, glass and plastic stream — ends up in the landfill right off the bat, according to DSNY figures. That’s because the material shouldn’t be in the bin in the first place, like plastic water bottles put in paper recycling, or food scraps, fabric or film plastic (like plastic shopping bags) put in either stream.
But if you’re not sure, it’s better to err on the side of throwing something in the recycling bin — don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Pratt and Balcones have the expertise and technology to handle it.
Are recycled materials really used to make new things?
It depends. Whether a material can actually be recycled depends on if there’s a buyer willing to purchase the material it’s made from and then either use it or sell it to a manufacturer who can.
Metals generally have strong markets. The material has lots of buyers that want it.
“What I see that just makes me weak in the knees is when people throw any kind of metal in the trash,” said Kara Napolitano, education and outreach manager at Balcones. “Metal is super recyclable and super precious and valuable.”
On the other hand, there’s not much of a market for, say, the material in plastic shopping bags and bubble wrap. Those usually end up being incinerated — which creates energy, which some view as a positive reuse — or dumped in landfills.
What actually happens to your recycling?
Depending on what it is — paper or plastic, metal or glass — and where you live, the material goes to Brooklyn, Jersey City or Staten Island to get sorted and cleaned.
Let’s start with the city’s plastic, metal and glass recycling.
Most of that ends up at Balcones in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. It’s a high-tech, state-of-the-art plant — one of the largest of its kind in North America, based on the 1,000 tons of material it receives each day.
Sanitation workers put paper recycling onto barges at a transfer station on the west side of Manhattan, Jan. 21, 2025. Credit: Alex Krales/THE CITY
The materials, mostly bagged, sent there through the DSNY’s curbside pick-up— mostly bagged — get thrown into an enormous, raggedy pile in the middle of what’s essentially a warehouse on the waterfront. The recyclables collected in just one day make a pile that’s bigger than a house.
Then a front-end loader — a vehicle easily mistaken for a bulldozer — pushes it all, bit by bit, into a sorting machine.
From there, the materials travel by conveyor belt throughout the facility. A so-called ‘liberator’ machine rips open the plastic bags, and another mechanism breaks any glass. Bits of broken glass fall through openings, while cans and bottles continue the journey. A magnet removes all magnetic metal, and an eddy current — electric currents induced by magnetic fields — ejects non-magnetic metal.
A series of optical sorters — near-infrared cameras — identify items by their chemical makeup and air jets shoot different kinds of materials onto other conveyor belts. Human workers — who stand in white huts along the machine to separate materials by hand — perform a final clean-up to ensure quality.
The hums and whizzes of the machinery can come to an abrupt stop if something — a bowling ball, garden hose or string lights — gets stuck or tangled.
Finally, the sorted material gets smashed into bales, which get sold to reclaimers, who set into motion the process of transforming the material. Prices for each material fluctuate regularly. Napolitano said aluminum tends to be the most valuable metal, and jugs for milk and water tend to be the most valuable plastic.
Anything that’s trash — that is, cannot be recycled or doesn’t have reclaimers willing to buy it — goes to the landfill. And Balcones has to pay for that. It costs money to send materials to landfills, whereas the company makes money selling recyclable materials. The less they send to landfills, the more revenue they make.
Balcones has a loss rate of 5%, Napolitano said, which means the amount of material “lost in the process,” including stuff falling through cracks, or getting sorted into the wrong category.
Glass from Balcones in Sunset Park goes to the company’s Jersey City facility, where it gets further sorted. Commercial glass furnaces buy some of the glass to make new bottles and jars. Some might be used for fiberglass or construction aggregate, a granular material often used to reinforce or stabilize foundations of buildings.
The companies that buy glass from Balcones, Napolitano said, want glass from bottles and jars only — so things like Pyrex cookingware or glass candle holders almost always get landfilled.
Plastic gets sorted by type — for instance, PET, which is used in soda and water bottles, and polypropylene, used in to-go containers and yogurt cups. Balcones sells each type to companies all over North America, including in Canada, Georgia, Alabama and Ohio.
The reclaimers remove the labels (those get trashed), chop up the plastic into flakes, wash them and turn them into pellets. Then those pellets are sold to companies that make items from plastic material, including bottles, shirts, toys and carpets.
Metal bales are sent to smelters, who melt the metal in order to make it usable for new products like appliances or cans. Different facilities take different types of metal: magnetic, non-magnetic and bulky metal. Appliances, which Balcones accepts, go to facilities equipped to shred the appliances, recover the metal components and further process them.
Paper recycling: A different path.
All of New York City’s paper recycling goes to Pratt Industries Paper Mill on the western shore of Staten Island. There, the paper gets sorted out from the other materials people throw into their recycling bin. Everything that’s not paper — like plastic and food bits — gets taken out, with metals separated. (More on this below.)
“There is no paper mill in the country that is set up to run municipal waste unsorted, except this mill,” said Muneer Ahmad, general manager at Pratt. “We get everything loose from the city. As you can imagine, in those plastic bags, there’s pretty much everything.”
After sorting, the paper goes to a pulper, where it’s mixed with hot water to make a giant soup. The mixture breaks down all the fibers of the various kinds of paper. Next comes screening, where anything bigger than about half an inch gets rejected, including any leftover pieces of metal, plastic or glass.
Then the pulp, now cleaned and screened, goes on a paper machine, which forms it into sheets. The sheets get reeled into massive rolls, weighing as much as 25 tons, and then another machine slits those big rolls into smaller ones able to be trucked out to other Pratt facilities in the northeast.
Recycling is turned into paper products at a Pratt Industries plant on Staten Island. Credit: Courtesy of Pratt Industries
The Staten Island plant produces about 1,000 tons of recycled paper every day.
Pratt also runs plants in Allentown and Carlisle, both in Pennsylvania, which make recycled-paper boxes for customers like Amazon, Home Depot and Walmart. And Pratt makes cardboard display boxes for stores.
A small amount of the recycled paper Pratt produces — around 10%, by Ahmad’s estimate — gets turned into pizza boxes at Pratt’s corrugator on Staten Island, which makes as many as 6 million pizza boxes a month. A distributor sells the boxes to pizzerias in New York and New Jersey.
And what happens to anything that gets rejected during the process? Materials like plastic and sludge get turned into bales on site and then sent to an incinerator that burns them to produce energy. Metals, Ahmad said, get transported for recycling.
Isn’t plastic recycling a myth? Don’t most plastics end up in a landfill anyway?
Some plastics do get truly recycled — i.e. turned into new items — but we are still pumping a ton of new plastic into the world.
You may have heard some alarming statistics about the tiny share of plastic that gets recycled.
The Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, estimated 8.7% of plastics were recycled across the United States in 2018. Another study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development put that figure at 4% in 2019.
Those numbers consider all the plastic material produced, which is relatively cheap and easy for companies to do. Some scientists and environmental advocates are pushing for regulations that limit the production of new plastic to begin with or make producers responsible for a product’s end-of-life management.
Pedestrians walk by a giant pile of recycling in the Financial District, Nov. 29, 2022. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
Jennie Romer, a sustainability consultant and author of the book “Can I Recycle This?”, said that just because something is recyclable, it still has an impact on the environment.
“For example, for plastic water bottles, you still have to look upstream. You’re extracting petrochemicals to make the bottle itself. A lot of emissions come from that and come from manufacturing,” Romer said. “We need systemic change to move towards reusables.”
All that being said, locally we could be recycling a lot more plastic than we do. In New York City, more than half of the rigid plastics that could be recycled don’t end up in the recycling bin to begin with.
Didn’t China stop accepting waste from the U.S.? How did that affect trash here?
In 2018, China stopped accepting most plastics from abroad. Before that, it had taken in almost half of global recyclable material for about 25 years. That change had a big effect on many other cities, which stopped accepting certain material in their recycling streams or landfilled much more trash.
But New York City was mostly insulated from China’s policy change.
“We were protected by some long-term contracts,” Goodman said. Those contracts — which extend until 2034 with Pratt and 2032 with Balcones — mandate the companies accept recyclable materials and put them to beneficial use.
Pratt is almost entirely vertically integrated, which means the company turns the recycled materials into other materials.
Balcones, on the other hand, has its own agreements with buyers that purchase the different materials. Buyers, mostly based on the East Coast, can count on New York City to consistently produce a high volume of high-quality bales of material because our waste steam is so massive and our processing facilities are top-notch.
A barge carries paper recycling to a processing center on Staten Island. Credit: Courtesy of Pratt Industries
But Romer noted it’s possible New York City could have still been affected by China’s import ban because China was “such a huge market.”
Some of the buyers of, say, low-value plastic bales that originated from Balcones, might have “had a harder time finding markets for those materials,” she said.
That means some of that material may have been shipped overseas, possibly to countries already drowning in other countries’ trash amid poor health and environmental regulations.
The bottom line
With all the problems with recycling, you may be left wondering: Does it really matter if I sort my stuff and recycle it?
This much is true: Recycling material prevents stuff from entering landfills or incinerators, which create planet-warming greenhouse gases and air pollutants.
But Napolitano of Balcones warned New Yorkers to stop thinking that recycling saves the planet. It doesn’t! It’s a less lofty but still meaningful act.
“You’re recycling to save materials,” she said. “Reduce and reuse to save the planet.”
Want more? Read Part One of our recycling series here, answering all your burning questions about how to recycle everything from milk cartons to bowling balls. If we didn’t answer your question, write to us at ask@thecity.nyc.
Our nonprofit newsroom relies on donations from readers to sustain our local reporting and keep it free for all New Yorkers. Donate to THE CITY today.
The post Where Does NYC’s Recycling Go and How Much Really Gets Reused, Anyway? appeared first on THE CITY – NYC News.
