Dan Greenlee faithfully takes his recyclables to the big blue bin behind a grocery store in Wintersville, but he never gave much thought to where it goes after that.

"I really have no idea," Greenlee said. "I just hope it's for good."

NEWS9 followed the path of the big blue bin to the Jefferson-Belmont Regional Solid Waste Authority sorting yard on Route 43 near Wintersville.

There, a team of three men upended the bin and sorted glass, metal, plastic and paper by hand.

The paper, more than a million pounds of it last year, gets taken to Valley Converting, a privately owned converting company and paper mill in Toronto, Ohio.

There, paper products are broken down into component fibers, dried out and pressed flat.

The end result is new cardboard, which Valley Converting sells through a broker to companies across the country.

"The backs of legal pads of paper, desk calendars (and) hardback books are all made out of (our) recycled paper," said Mike Biasi of Valley Converting.

Glass, plastic and metal recyclables from the Wintersville sorting yard are taken by truck to the District Recycling Center in Portage County, Ohio.

Aluminum and steel cans are dumped onto a conveyor belt. Steel cans are pulled from the line by a large electromagnet, leaving only the aluminum cans behind.

Steel cans are sold to scrap distributors who, in turn, sell them back to steel makers that use scrap in the manufacture of new steel.

Similarly, aluminum cans are made into new aluminum.

Glass bottles that pass through the Portage County facility are sorted by color and sold to glass companies that make them into new glass containers or into fiberglass.

Plastic bottles that once held bleach, soda or milk are sorted by color and type. The recycling center sells those to companies that either melt them down for use as new plastic containers or new polyster clothing and carpeting.

Patrick Lanaghan, executive director of the Solid Waste Authority, told NEWS9 some recyclables do end up in local landfills, but that only happens when demand for that specific material is low.

The district processed just over 336,000 pounds of recyclable material in 1998.

In 2006, they processed more than 1.6 million pounds.

Part of the district's 15-year plan, currently being reviewed by state environmental regulators, is to expand curbside recycling.

Lanaghan expects their annual tonnage to continue to grow.

For more information about the authority's recycling and litter programs, click here.

Eric Minor, NEWS9