A mountain of unsorted recycling material rises nearly two stories against a back wall, and grows higher each time the company’s white recycling trucks roll in and dump their loads onto the concrete floor. Elsewhere in the facility, workers and machines sort and compress materials, placing the bales into freestanding stacks, just like the movie’s titular trash-compacting robot.

But this isn’t science fiction, it’s a window into our waste-filled environmental reality. And it’s also the site of an innovative artist residency.

“This place is crazy. I love it,” says Maria Phillips, who runs the artist in residence program at Recology. Before taking on the management role, she was a 2018 artist in residence here, making large installations out of hundreds of “single-use” cups that hold our daily lattes. Now she’s wearing a T-shirt that reads, “Make Art, Not Landfill,” and giving an enthusiastic overview of the Material Recovery Facility, which she calls “Murph,” like a good buddy.

Phillips stands in a conference room overlooking the conveyor belts, forklifts and tall garage doors left open to accommodate the stream of trucks. She gesticulates while describing the many-step recycling process, how materials travel from the pile on the floor to the gigantic green sorting machine with zigzagging conveyor belts, before arriving at the baler. After that, the bales of bundled paper, plastic bottles, even broken down recycling bins sit in stacks, awaiting purchase and pickup by whomever can provide a new, recycled life.

“Aren’t those bales beautiful?” Phillips says, as the paper edges flutter in the breeze.