“We all know it’s a good idea to recycle, but what happens to that aluminum can or all that paper after you put it in the recycling bin? Where does it go? What does it become? In its second life, how does this water bottle become a backpack, jeans, or shoes, or even a WM shirt?”

This promotional video from WM, Waste Management, goes inside a Material Recovery Facility, called “a murph” for short, to see how trash is collected, sorted, sorted again, and then compressed into giant bales.

One of North America’s largest waste management services, WM has partnered with Repreve to help turn the refuse into other products. In the promo video below, plastics are processed into small pieces called nurdles before being transformed into recycled polyester fibers.