CarbonLite: Inside the World’s Largest Plastic Bottle Recycling Plant

CarbonLite is the world’s largest “bottle-to-bottle” plastic recycling plant in Riverside, Calif.

“SoCal Connected” takes a look inside the state-of-the-art facility where billions of plastic bottles are churned on an annual basis. The process involves transforming old plastic bottles into PET pellets and flakes in order to produce new plastic bottles.

The bottles are required to go through metal detectors, a special “prewash” phase, and a label-removing facility before they can become shiny, brand new pellets.

Even though your plastic water bottle might not weigh as much, a square bale of plastic bottles can weigh more than 1,300 pounds, as Derrick Shore reveals in this segment of “SoCal Connected.”