MRFs and recycling centers continue making efficiency and capacity improvements this fall, celebrating both multi-million dollar upgrades as well as smaller, strategic equipment improvements.
Here’s a look at some recent recycling facility news. We’d love to hear about your recycling facility updates. Send us an email at waste.dive.editors@industrydive.com.
Upgrades at Circular Services-run MRF in North Carolina aim to triple recovery
Circular Services has opened its newly retrofitted Amble Drive Materials Recovery Facility in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. The retrofits come after a year where the company processed the County’s single-stream recyclables at the nearby Pence Road facility.
The upgraded facility, retrofitted in partnership with the county and Van Dyk Recycling Solutions, now has 16 optical sorters and can achieve a processing rate of 40 tons per hour and an average throughput of 300 tons of material per day, Circular Services said in a news release. That’s nearly triple the capacity of the former Pence Road system, the company said.
“Amble Drive is now one of the most advanced recycling facilities on the east coast,” said Ron Gonen, CEO of Circular Services, in a statement.
County officials said the improvements also allow residents to recycle new kinds of materials. That includes paper cups, plastic cups, polypropylene containers like yogurt cups, and clear plastic PET food containers, such as the kind used for prepared foods.
Circular Services partnered with the county in 2025 when it inked a five-year contract to run the Pence Road facility and manage maintenance and material marketing while the Amble Drive facility underwent improvements. That deal helped expand Circular Services’ national footprint into a new region for the company.
Circular Services will continue managing day-to-day operations, processing and marketing of recovered materials at Amble Drive. Circular Services says the Pence Road facility will “transition to its planned role supporting industrial and construction & demolition material recovery.”
New MRF in Grand Junction, Colorado, aims to make area a regional recycling hub
Grand Junction, Colorado, expects to open its new MRF by late December. The facility positions the city as a regional hub for recycling and helps the state comply with its new extended producer responsibility for packaging law, according to Bruin Waste, which will operate the site.
Grand Junction’s current facility can sort and process about 1,500 tons of material per year, but the new facility will be able to process the same amount in about two weeks, with a throughput of 12 tons per hour, The Grand Junction Sentinel reported. It will employ around 12 people.
The facility also aims to make recycling more efficient along the Western Slope. The facility is the only automated MRF in Colorado’s Western Slope region, according to Bulk Handling Systems, which supplied the sorting equipment.
Equipment includes AI-enabled sorting systems that use “air ejection” to separate materials, as well as a monitoring and analytics platform for operators to make sorting decisions, BHS said.
The city paid around $29 million for the project, which included renovations on a former warehouse building that now houses the MRF, as well as costs for new sporting equipment, The Sentinel reported. In 2025, Bruin Waste was accepted into the Rural Jump Start program from the state of Colorado, which helps offset up to $20,000 in startup costs and exempts the facility from certain state and local income taxes for up to eight years.
California Waste Solutions aims to aid local illegal dumping crackdown
California Waste Solutions, the recycling contractor for the City of Oakland, has installed AI-enabled scanners and improved its optical sorting systems at its Bay Area facilities. The move has an added benefit of helping the city detect illegal dumping, operators said.
California Waste Solutions said it is installing EverestLabs AI scanners at its 10th Street MRF in Oakland and increasing optical sorting capacity from its Pellenc equipment at its Timothy MRF in San Jose. The company says its recent AI investments help give better insight and data into what type of materials are moving through their facilities because it offers a continuous record of materials instead of a once-per-shift report.
"There is no question that the more you reduce illegal waste dumping, the more you see high-quality results come out of recycling facilities such as ours," said David Duong, founder of California Waste Solutions, in a statement.
At the same time, Oakland is working with aerial AI program Aerbits to detect and locate illegal dumping activity, the companies announced in a news release. California Waste Solutions provided trucks to assist with removing some of the illegally dumped items, the city said in a news release.
Other recycling facility news
- Nespresso pod recycling: Nespresso says it has made a “significant investment” in recycling infrastructure for Westchester County's Refuse Disposal District in New York. The investment allows county residents to place used Nespresso capsules and other “small, non-ferrous aluminum items” in their curbside recycling bins, the company said in a news release. The Glass Packaging Institute and the Aluminum Association partnered on the project, noting the MRF improvements would help reduce contamination on the glass line and recover more aluminum for recycling.
- Rural recycling in New Hampshire: Tamworth, New Hampshire, has opened a new recycling center meant to divert material from the nearby transfer station. The facility accepts certain plastics, cardboard, paper and aluminum. The project was funded in part by a nearly $500,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture grant and about $800,000 came from local taxpayers, The Conway Daily Sun reported.
- Maui EPA grant: Maui, Hawai’i, announced it will spend its $3.6 million federal grant from the U.S EPA to build West Maui’s first recycling center. The Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling grant will help officials acquire a parcel of land for the center. The facility is meant to divert about 1,794 tons of green waste, recyclables and bulky items from landfills and illegal dumping sites each year.
- Baler improvements: Northern Transitions, an organization that employs people who face barriers to employment, has installed a refurbished baler at the Chippewa County Recycling Center in Michigan. The replacement is a notable upgrade for the non-profit, which recycled about 1.7 million pounds of material in 2025, Soo Leader reported.
