Each week, Sandra McBride sets out two bins overflowing with everything from newspapers and juice cartons to detergent bottles and junk mail. More than just reducing landfill waste, McBride is helping supply a growing international market for scrap paper, plastic and metal.

McBride, who lives in Raleigh and works part-time as a statistician at Duke University, has been dedicated to recycling since she and her husband had children a few years ago.

"I think about the landfills and that we're producing a lot of garbage as a young family," McBride said. "I kind of have this attitude that I really need to think about the condition I'm leaving this planet for my kids' kids.

"I find myself constantly fishing stuff out of the garbage," she said.

The thriftiness and environmental consciousness of McBride and others like her is part of the reason the volume of curbside recycling has increased significantly in North Carolina in recent years.

Last year alone, it rose 12.5 percent. Large cities have expanded their programs to serve more households. And new private recycling facilities have sprung up to handle materials, as the prices for newsprint, old milk jugs and cardboard have risen sharply in the past decade.

"It's made a big difference," said Scott Mouw, the state recycling coordinator. "If we weren't recycling, there would be another 1.3 million tons going into landfills. We would be using that much more virgin material to make products we're buying every day -- more petroleum for plastic, more trees for paper and more ground chewed up to get metals out."

But North Carolinians are underachievers in recycling and could do much better, Mouw said. The volume of recycling is going up, but so is the volume of garbage.

"We're still throwing away about 40 to 50 percent of our aluminum cans," Mouw said.

The average household produces about 1,880 pounds of trash a year. Of that, about 745 pounds are recyclable, Mouw said. But North Carolina households recycle on average about 243 pounds a year, only a third of the potential.

The bottles, cans and paper that McBride and her neighbors recycle end up on the slab floor of Sonoco Recycling, an automated materials recovery facility in Southeast Raleigh.

It's here that the mighty river of recyclables that flows out of homes and businesses every day is separated back into its constituent streams. The materials are sorted by type -- paper, aluminum, steel, various types of plastic -- then bundled into 1,400-pound bales of paper and 1,000-pound cubes of plastic and metal and shipped to manufacturers in the U.S. and abroad, where the scrap is turned into new containers and packaging.

Using less labor

Sonoco's nearly $5 million, 45,000-square-foot recycling plant in Raleigh opened in July 2006. It added automation to a process that had largely depended on manual labor to separate materials.

The plant receives recyclables from Raleigh, Garner, Wake Forest and Wilson, plus a number of businesses.

"It was a big investment for our company," said Jim Foster, manager of Sonoco's recycling plant in Raleigh. "We are a packaging company that needs materials to make products. There is a lot of interest in increasing this part of the business."

Tractors shove the 20-foot high heaps of soda bottles, cans and paper onto a series of conveyor belts that rise like escalators. Workers pick out trash that shouldn't be in the stream of recyclables -- styrofoam egg cartons or plastic wrap.

The heart of the separation process is a steeply sloped series of spinning rubber wheels called a news screen. Newsprint and scrap paper, propelled by the spinning wheels, are light enough and get enough traction on the wheels to climb the slope and go over the top onto a conveyor. Meanwhile, the plastic bottles and cans fall onto other conveyors where they are further separated.

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