Forty tons per hour. That's the new processing line speed at the retrofitted Amble Drive Materials Recovery Facility in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina — nearly triple what the old Pence Road system handled. The build, completed by Circular Services with equipment partner Van Dyk Recycling Solutions, marks the sharpest single-stream capacity jump on the East Coast this fall.

What does the Amble Drive line actually deliver?

The facility now runs 16 optical sorters and clears an average of 300 tons of material per day. Mecklenburg County residents can drop paper cups, plastic cups, polypropylene containers like yogurt cups, and clear PET food trays into their bins, the company said.

"Amble Drive is now one of the most advanced recycling facilities on the east coast," Circular Services CEO Ron Gonen said.

The upgrade followed Circular Services' five-year contract to run Pence Road while Amble Drive was under construction — a deal that pushed the operator into a new region. Pence Road now shifts to industrial and C&D recovery.

Why is Grand Junction spending $29M on a Western Slope hub?

Grand Junction, Colorado expects to open a new MRF by late December — one capable of processing in two weeks what the current facility handles in a full year.

Bruin Waste runs the site. Bulk Handling Systems supplied the AI-enabled sorting equipment. The city paid around $29 million for the buildout, which also covered new sporting equipment, The Grand Junction Sentinel reported.

The 12-ton-per-hour throughput makes it the only automated MRF on Colorado's Western Slope. That's a positioning play tied directly to the state's new extended producer responsibility law for packaging. Bruin Waste joined the state's Rural Jump Start program in 2025, which offsets up to $20,000 in startup costs and exempts the facility from certain state and local income taxes for eight years.

Roughly 12 people will staff the site.

How is AI sorting reshaping Oakland's recycling signal?

California Waste Solutions — the contractor for the City of Oakland — has installed EverestLabs AI scanners at its 10th Street MRF and bumped optical sorting capacity at its Timothy facility in San Jose using Pellenc gear. The setup replaces once-per-shift reports with a continuous record of what flows past the cameras.

That data feeds a parallel crackdown on illegal dumping. Oakland has paired the work with aerial startup Aerbits to detect dump sites, and California Waste Solutions provided trucks to clear debris.

"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," founder David Duong said.

What else moved this fall?

• A Nespresso-backed upgrade at Westchester County's New York MRF lets residents drop small non-ferrous aluminum items, including Nespresso capsules, into curbside bins. The Glass Packaging Institute and Aluminum Association partnered on the project.
• Tamworth, New Hampshire opened a recycling center funded by a nearly $500,000 USDA grant and $800,000 in local funds, the Conway Daily Sun reported.
• Maui will spend a $3.6M federal EPA Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling grant on West Maui's first recycling center, targeting roughly 1,794 tons of green waste, recyclables, and bulky items annually.
• Northern Transitions installed a refurbished baler at Chippewa County's Michigan recycling center; the nonprofit recovered about 1.7 million pounds of material in 2025.

What happens next?

The Grand Junction ribbon-cutting in late December will be the first real test of Colorado's EPR economics on the Western Slope. Watch the facility's first full month of tonnage — if producers route material there instead of shipping east, the model holds. Amble Drive's expanded list of accepted materials, meanwhile, sets a contamination control test for Mecklenburg County's next quarterly reporting cycle.