THE QUESTIONS START at the blue recycling bin. Will this recycle? Should the lid stay on? Does it even matter?

Yes, it matters. New technologies allow recycling centers to sort and resell 80 percent of the material they receive. At Recology’s new Sonoma Marin material recovery facility in Santa Rosa, which officially opened Monday, the recovery rate can be up to 85 percent.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.