In November of 2018, both the Grade 5 and Grade 6 class at Twin Rivers took a trip to the various locations in their town where the waste and recycling ends up. It was such a powerful field trip to take for the students to have an experience to see what actually happens to their waste and recycling once it leaves their homes. We were blessed to have passionate and knowledgeable individuals at each stop to explain the details of how they processed the various materials.
When we traveled to the local landfill to see the past 60 years of garbage from our area, our landfill attendant Stan passionately described that 83 tons of waste comes in per day (equal to 14 elephants) and needs to be distributed and covered in a very precise way. We then got to visit the transfer station where all our recycling is compacted and bundled up in large cubes to be shipped away. And our final stop was the bottle depot where we got to hear how all the recycled bottles, and electronics get sorted. 
