Norcal Unveils Recycling Center

Norcal Waste’s new facility in San Francisco officially opens this week. Recycle Central will officially open at noon on March 5. The facility is permitted to sort and bale up to 2,100 tons of recyclables a day. While the grand opening of the facility was March 5, the facility itself has been opened for around six months. Construction of the facility began about a year ago. At the start the facility was running in the first phase.

Recycle Central is located on Pier 96 in San Francisco's Bay View District. Recyclables in this 200,000-square-foot plant are separated using a combination of specialized equipment and hand sorting. Sorted materials are baled and shipped directly to end consumers.

Inside the recycling facility disk screens send bottles and cans in one direction, float paper in another and further sort it into independent streams of newsprint and mixed paper (magazines, cardboard and junk mail.) A giant vacuum system sucks office paper off conveyer belts and automatically sends clean material to baling machines. A powerful magnet pulls steel and tin cans off the sorting belt and flips them into a large storage cage. Additionally, an eddy current separator is used to sort out aluminum cans.

The program is geared toward a single-stream collection and sortation program. A significant amount of the material that will be running through the recycling plant will come from the city of San Francisco’s curbside collection program.

San Francisco's recycling program makes recycling easy and convenient. People simply place paper, bottles and cans together in a blue cart. No more sorting paper from bottles and cans at home or work. Instead, recyclables are separated at Recycle Central.

The facility is expected to handle around 1,200 tons of recyclables a day when it is operating at full capacity.