My area has a two stream recycling system: one for paper/cardboard, and another for “co-mingled” "plastic, glass, metal. It’s all picked up the same as garbage every week. The biggest problem with zero sort recycling is that it’s hard to separate paper and plastics with automated machines based on their physical properties. So our central recycling facility has two independent factory lines to sort the components of each stream. The co-mingled line also has more humans who help make things easier for the machines and visually identify materials.

Ultimately, you need to have the materials purified as much as possible to be attractive to buyers who will then turn the sorted recycling into new products. Package it up on pallets and then it can be shipped by train or truck to the production factory.

Our central facility also has manual drop off for e-waste, appliances, bulk metal, and hazardous materials that have their unique recycling streams.