The Amble Drive Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, is now processing the county's single-stream recyclables at an average 300 tons per day. The site runs 16 Van Dyk optical sorters at a processing rate of 40 tons per hour.

That capacity comes from Circular Services, the New York-based recycling, composting and reuse operator that moved the county's residential recycling program into the rebuilt plant this month. Amble Drive replaces the smaller interim Pence Road MRF, which ran the contract for more than a year.

The new facility delivers roughly three times the throughput of the Pence Road setup it succeeded. Mecklenburg County financed the retrofit in partnership with Norwalk, Connecticut-based Van Dyk Recycling Solutions, which supplied the optical equipment and integration.

How big is the throughput upgrade?

The rebuild delivers four measurable gains over the previous installation:

• 16 Van Dyk optical sorters on the new sort line
• A processing rate of 40 tons per hour
• An average daily throughput of 300 tons
• A capacity lift of roughly 3x relative to Pence Road

Circular Services ranks the result among the most technologically equipped MRFs on the East Coast.

Which material streams can residents now recycle?

Circular Services and Mecklenburg County expanded the curbside single-stream list by four packaging categories:

• Paper cups, including coffee and fast-food serviceware
• Plastic cups
• Polypropylene (PP) containers such as yogurt cups and take-out clamshells
• Clear PET food containers used for produce and prepared meals

Each of those formats has historically landed in residue at conventional MRFs without dedicated optical recovery for cups or PP.

Circular Services CEO Ron Gonen tied the investment to commodity-recovery economics. "Mecklenburg County invested in the technology and infrastructure that will maximize the value of its recycle program," Gonen said. "Amble Drive is now one of the most advanced recycling facilities on the East Coast."

What is the future of the old Pence Road site?

Mecklenburg County selected Circular Services as its recycling partner in 2025 to run the interim plant while engineers rebuilt Amble Drive. The operator retains day-to-day management, processing, and marketing of recovered commodities at the new site under the same contract.

The County has not published a closure date for the Pence Road plant. The stated plan is to repurpose that site into a recovery hub for industrial and construction and demolition (C&D) materials — a stream that has carried its own sorting capacity questions across the region.

How does the retrofit translate into diversion?

Jeff Smithberger, Mecklenburg County's director of solid waste, framed the rebuild in landfill-avoidance terms. "The upgrades at Amble Drive allow us to process recyclables more efficiently and keep more everyday items out of the landfill," Smithberger said via the county press release.

The added categories target formats that the previous installation either pushed to residue or separated manually. PP yogurt cups and clear PET produce clamshells, in particular, will now move from disposal into bales. Circular Services has not disclosed end-market contracts or pricing for those new bale streams.

What reporting milestones will operators watch?

Two checkpoints will show whether the capacity gain turns into measured capture:

• County-published diversion and contamination data following the first full quarter of Amble Drive operations, expected in Q1 2027
• A transition timeline and reopening date for the Pence Road C&D and industrial hub

Until the County releases quarterly operating numbers, the 300 tons-per-day figure remains design capacity, not a measured diversion rate. Buyers of the new PET and PP bales will also be tracking the first round of county contamination audits to size inbound quality.