Don’t assume just because you tossed that empty container into the blue bin that it actually got reborn into a carpet, a T-shirt or another container.

In fact, about a quarter of material placed in those containers around the state won’t be recycled at all.

While much from those containers gets remade — much is shipped to China for processing — the amount that doesn’t could be rising even as enthusiasm for recycling and living greener soars, according to the Container Recycling Institute.

“The public is doing wishful recycling,” said Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste.

Many consumers see the big colored, rolling receptacles that have become staples of suburban streets as catch-all bins. They toss into those bins tons of material that can’t be reused — everything from split garden hoses to soiled diapers.

It’s a big problem amid many other woes for the state’s misfiring recyling circle.

Gnarly PVC parts, unwanted vinyl products and other misplaced goods can jam up sorting machines, slow production and, in the end, offer little recycling value, said Eloisa Orozco, a spokeswoman for garbage company Waste Management.

And that off-target waste often ends up in already jampacked landfills after the cumbersome, costly process of weeding them from the real recyclables.

Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature set an ambitious goal of 75 percent recycling, composting or reduction of solid waste by 2020. Right now, the state recycles less than half its waste, even though it has some of the highest recycling rates among U.S. states.

The system already faces mammoth challenges. Hundreds of recycling centers across the state have shuttered since last year, stung by plummeting scrap rates on the global market. And that’s despite a state subsidy program intended to help them weather market fluctuations.

Plucking nonrecyclable items from processing has driven up costs for trash collectors and the municipalities that pay them. Meanwhile, the state and local governments are demanding more efficiency.

While the state weighs options for fixing its recycling circle, processors are coming up with their own options.

Officials at Waste Management, one of the largest garbage collectors in Southern California, say they are confronting the problem by trying to get their customers to “go back to basics.”

The company has adopted the mantra: recycle often, recycle right.

The blue bin blues

The issue of sorting wasn’t always a problem. Blame it on the popularity of the curbside bin and the continuing evolution of how Americans consume.

The suburban recycling program began to flourish in California in the 1990s. While trash dumps filled to overflowing at alarming rates, the state Legislature demanded local jurisdictions cut waste to landfills by a quarter.

In response, curbside pickup programs popped over all over. Some programs introduced an array of different-colored bins for varied kinds of recyclable materials.

Residents separated out newspapers and bottles from their regular trash and placed them in the appropriate bin.

Though laborious, the process ensured that each of the materials were uncontaminated. In recycle-biz parlance, that means cardboard boxes weren’t crusted in old linguini, newspapers weren’t soaked in Fresca and materials were generally in good enough shape to reuse.

But the multiboxes didn’t sit well with garbage collectors.

The process was cumbersome and time-consuming for haulers, who had to pick up and empty each of the bins individually. Climbing in and out of the truck cabs meant the cost rose to insure the workers, too.

One bin for all

From nagging concerns about those multiple bins arose single-stream recycling, the system your local collector likely uses.

Everything that looks like it should be recycled goes in one bin. Trash haulers take the mixed materials to a facility where it’s sorted by an array of machines and humans.

More and more cities adopted the concept.

But it hasn’t been cheap. Sorting the bins’ contents costs more than having consumers organize their own garbage.

And as more nonrecycled material landed into those bins, costs rose even more. Processors passed their costs on to local government.

Other financial pressures have squeezed the industry, too, including collapsing prices overseas for recyclables and society’s shift away from newsprint as more information is consumed electronically.

People who skip the blue bin and take their bottles and cans to recycling centers themselves are finding that hundreds of recycling centers across the state have shuttered since last year, as scrap rates on the global market dived.

The state’s recycling fund is so precarious that the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery projected it wouldn’t have sufficient cash to make its payments off and on over the next two fiscal years.

Categorizing clutter

A mountain of plastic jugs, crumpled cardboard boxes, gift-wrapping paper and other discarded packaging tower over Adam Holt, Baldwin Park-based Allan Co.’s vice president.

Above him stands a massive conveyor belt where the trash rolls toward a line of men in hard hats and gloves.

The crew snags cups, paper and other items and tosses them down square chutes that lead to giant caged piles of glass, aluminum and other materials.

This is not a job for the fragile. The days can be grueling, picking through the unending procession of waste. And it smells icky.

Eventually, the tangle of plastic bags, boxes and bottles turns into neatly packed bales, each about 1,200 pounds of colorful stuff, categorized by plastic, paper and metal. Those bales are sold off to manufacturers who’ll turn them into new products.

“I love seeing a pile that looks like trash turn into something,” Holt said, watching a forklift move stacks of cubed aluminium cans and paper.

Your trash is changing

About five years ago, the piles inside the warehouse looked very different.

The huge room was jammed with mountains of magazines and newspapers. They commanded healthy resale rates. There was lots of product — papers were still hitting plenty of porches, and magazine racks were still popular places to peruse the news.

And there was still a voracious demand for second-time-around paper. But that need had started to wane.

Blame Steve Jobs.

Consumers switched from the morning paper and monthly magazines to the supersharp screens of their iPhones and tablets made by Jobs’ trend-bending Apple Inc. — and other companies that reshaped how we consume information.

Blame Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, too.

His internet-retail juggernaut made next-day and same-day home delivery the expectation of more and more consumers. That also radically impacted the waste industry.

A demand for printed products overseas buoyed the market for a while, but then evaporated, too.

As newsprint receded, the gap in the waste bin was backfilled by more lightweight plastics and cardboard boxes used to deliver shoes, books and other consumer products.

“That hurt the recycling industry a lot,” said Mike Centers, president of Titus MRF Services.

The processing puzzle

The math is simple: Lighter materials cost more to process.

“Newsprint was a heavier commodity than plastic,” said Centers, “and at one point it was 65 percent of the single stream. It was replaced by lighter material that costs more to sort.”

Leftovers discarded by workers go to companies like Centers’, which further sorts and sells the materials.

Some of it is marginally recyclable. Translation: It can be processed, but it costs more and takes longer.

Some of it, though, is not recyclable at all.

Research and development teams find new ways to resuse such material each year. But the changes aren’t arriving fast enough to keep tons of such stuff out of the landfill.

“The innovation in our world is giving us more different types of things,” said Susan Collins, who heads the Culver City-based Container Recycling Institute that studied the state’s recycling rate.

Meanwhile, that container you assumed was recyclable costs processors and, in turn, the taxpayer as it makes its way from your blue bin to the county dump.

“Recycling is constantly battling against that challenge of taking the diversity of material,” Collins said, “and trying to create concentrations of commodities suitable for manufacturing.

“It’s possible to do it, but it’s a real challenge given the economic realities,” she said.

Know your trash

Among the solutions: Getting to know your garbage.

“It becomes the bin of last resort,” Murray said. “Folks are throwing almost anything in there.”

California doesn’t keep records about how much of what’s placed in the blue bin actually gets recycled. But experts say that it can vary by area, from as much as 93 percent to only 60 percent depending on the city.

One way to change the tide is to educate consumers.

“Put big stickers on the inside of bins,” Collins said. “We have to make public education and information really accessible.”

Orozco of Waste Management said people need “to pay close attention to what they are putting in the bin.”

Alas, there is not a simple list of “recycle this/not that” rules. Waste haulers can differ wildly in what they accept as recyclable.

Some accept plastic grocery bags, while other do not, because the value is so low it’s not worth it for them.

So, before you drop that milk carton in the recycle bin, make sure your curbside hauler is actually recycling them.

Some companies like Allan Co. are trying to capture more items that were once discarded.

“We are getting better,” said Stephen Young, the head of Allan Co. “If we pick it out, it’s going to get used.”

But there remain growing pains inside an evolving industry that many see as an environmental defender.

“There have been substantially higher volumes (in recycling),” Murray said, “but we have paid a price for it.”