An old, torn shoe zooms by at 280 feet per minute through a colorful stream of crinkled paper.
The shoe tries its best to blend in, but an agile hand catches the infiltrator and dumps it into a bin with other non-paper intruders such as Christmas lights and garden hoses.
This kind of excitement is a daily occurrence at Friedman Recycling.
Every day, the 90,000 square-foot facility receives between 200 and 230 tons of material that needs to be sorted and processed.
These recyclables are collected from Albuquerque households and recycling drop-off sites.
In 2011, under Mayor Richard Berry, Albuquerque signed a 12-year agreement with Friedman Recycling. This was part of the city’s Integrated Waste Management Plan, a vision to reach the best possible waste diversion for the city.
Friedman Recycling opened its doors in 2013. That same year, the Solid Waste Management Department distributed more than 140,000 blue carts to residential customers in the city.
Trucks take the contents of these carts to the materials recovery facility.
After being weighed on a gigantic scale, the trucks dump the materials in an area called “the tipping floor” to be stored until it’s time for sorting.
There’s more to the process than human beings sorting by hand though. It also involves modern technology, such as conveyor belts, screens and magnets.
Plant Manager Robert Taylor said that, although the machines do a lot of the work, the people there are vital to make sure everything runs smoothly.
Once the sorting process is finished, Friedman Recycling sells the materials to domestic and international clients.
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Albuquerque must provide the company with at least 3,200 tons of recyclables each month or the city has to pay a fine, as part of the collaboration’s profit- and cost-sharing agreement.
The city is still not consistently meeting the quota, but Taylor says he believes this problem will eventually dissolve.
“There has definitely been an improvement since we first opened,” Taylor said. “I think within the next 18 months the city will hit their goal and get more consistent about it.”
If the city met its quota every month, Albuquerque would be recycling 38,400 tons of material per year.
While the city is not quite there yet, there has been a lot of improvement in the last few years. In the 2008 fiscal year, before Friedman Recycling’s arrival to Albuquerque, the city recycled 24,450 tons of material.
By 2014, that number improved to 31,306, and then 34, 206 in 2015.
“As a state, as a nation, as a society, we’ve got plenty of room to grow,” Taylor said.
Taylor has now been working in the recycling business for almost 10 years, but he admits this was never the plan.
He used to work in the construction industry, but was offered a job in the recycling industry back in Texas, where he lived at the time. Taylor said no to the offer four times, but eventually gave in.
“I didn’t know the first thing about recycling,” he said. “But I never back down from a challenge.”
Now, Taylor said he is glad he took the job because he knows he is doing something to help future generations.
“There’s proponents out there that say it is not economic to recycle right now,” he said. “Really, it’s not. There’s a cost to it. But we shouldn’t be looking at it as a revenue source. We should be looking at it as an opportunity to do the right thing.”
Isabel Gonzalez is a sports reporter for the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at sports@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @cisabelg.
