Recycle Central® @ Pier 96
The Recycle Central® modern recycling plant in San Francisco recycles and commingles glass and plastic bottles, tubs and lids, non-ferrous metals including aluminum and tin cans and paper and cardboard.
Designed and constructed by Recology in partnership with The City of San Francisco, the Recycle Central plant opened in 2002 and is a key component of efforts to help the City make additional progress toward achieving zero waste by 2020, a goal set by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
The Recycle Central plant is 185,000 square feet and processes approximately 750 tons of commingled recycling
a day.
San Francisco established a commingled recycling system in 2001 to make recycling easy and convenient for all customers (commercial, residential and multi-family dwellings). Customers simply toss all their recyclables including plastic toys without wire or metal parts into their blue recycle carts or large commercial containers. All carts and container contents are then collected and delivered to the Recycle Central processing plant.
Within the Recycle Central plant, the recyclable material moves across a series of conveyer belts and semi-automated equipment with spinning disks which separate paper from bottles and cans. Magnets pull out steel cans and an eddy current separator repels aluminum cans off of the Recycle Central line along with plastics that are hand sorted by recycling workers. Eventually, the commingled recycling material processed within the Recycle Central facility is sorted into 16 different commodities.
Recology ships more than 30 large containers six days a week from the Recycle Central plant to paper mills, glass plants, and other manufacturing facilities that purchase specific recycled materials. The Recycle Central plant is the largest shipper of waste paper on the West Coast. Thanks to the efforts of Recology customers and what happens inside the Recycle Central plant, San Francisco has a reputation in the recycling industry of producing high-quality bales of recovered resources for re-manufacturing.
The Recycle Central workforce includes more than 180 employee-owners. Recology hires employees from zip codes immediately surrounding the facility in the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood.
Recycle Central workers like to say, "Life's a mess and we sort it out."
Recology takes pride in resource recovery at the Recycle Central plant, which is the new means of waste management or managing the waste stream by reclaiming "waste" so that the material is collected, recycled and re-manufactured into new products and not put into a landfill. The Recycle Central facility is where Recology demonstrates how its rallying cry, WASTE ZERO, is put into practice to make best and highest use of all resources recovered.
Powered in part by the sun
In 2007, through a partnership with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, Recology installed solar panels on the roof of the Recycle Central facility, capable of offsetting 30 percent of the facility's electricity needs. The system is exceeding expectations due to the orientation of the solar panels and the reflection of sunlight off San Francisco Bay.Recycle Central® @ Pier 96
P.O. Box 881476
San Francisco, CA 94188
(415) 621-6200
Map and Driving Directions
Contact Us