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.

The automated sorting process means that mixtures of papers, plastics and other products no longer have to be separated at the curb. They can all be collected together, then separated later.

"What this really does is it makes collection so much easier and so much cheaper and more efficient," Mouw said. "That's where the opportunity is. Things have changed. While we were sleeping, the materials processing industries have woken up and things have improved."

Global market helps

Sonoco's Raleigh plant generates about 400 tons per day of paper, cardboard, plastic and metal, Foster said. Some of the huge bales of paper are shipped to Sonoco's paper mills in South Carolina and Virginia to be turned into new paper. Some are shipped overseas to China, India and Korea.

"This whole business is a commodity-driven business," Foster said. "It's supply and demand. More people want a product made of recycled goods."

In the mid-1990s, there was no market for cereal boxes, cardboard and other mixed paper. Because Sonoco and other companies have been able to find markets for the materials, cities such as Raleigh have added junk mail, catalogs, cereal boxes and other paper to the mix of recyclable items.

"It's China that wants this grade of paper," Mouw said. "They're making the paper that comes back on the shelves of Wal-Mart as packaging."

The city of Raleigh is paid about $50,000 a month for the recyclables it delivers to Sonoco, city officials say. That doesn't cover the full cost of the recycling program. But it helps offset the cost and avoids the expense the city would pay if it took the goods to the Wake County landfill, where it would cost $26 or more a ton to deposit.

Bigger bins

Some smaller towns with low participation rates have struggled to pay for curbside recycling collection programs. The number of programs statewide has declined from 260 to 220 in the past decade, even though the overall tonnage has increased because of expansion of programs in Raleigh, Charlotte and other cities.

To continue the upward trend, Mouw said communities should consider providing larger bins so people can recycle more. Many people stop recycling when they fill up the bin. In 2005, the town of Wake Forest replaced its bins with 48-gallon, roll-out recycling carts.

As a result, the number of households participating in recycling soared, said Mike Barton, Wake Forest public works director. Barton said the amount of recycling had nearly doubled, from 64.5 tons per month to 125 tons per month, since converting to rollout carts.

"Basically, it boils down to it's much easier to get that rollout cart out to the street than a recycling bin," Barton said. "It shocked me. I knew we'd increase our numbers, but I didn't expect it to increase that much. I thank the town for going with the carts and thank the residents for using them. They are definitely using them."