Photos by Billie Winter

The sweet smell of garbage fills the warehouse, but it only registers in whiffs. A large, green apparatus in the center of the space houses machines that buzz and churn the air, keeping it from getting stagnant. Beyond the green walls, an M.C. Escher-like maze of conveyor belts and stairways moves 300 tons of King County recyclables daily—Coke cans, the Seattle Times business section, a mass of cardboard. Humans with spatulas flick out the undesirables, such as clothing, plastic bags, and even a string of Christmas lights, so the material doesn’t wrap around the spinning, wheel-like sorting contraptions. Despite the human quality control, one harnessed worker climbs inside the machine every night and cuts off any obstructions.

The process filters each item into its own place. Glass flows off one belt into a metal trough below in a cascade of sharp tinkles. Another magic machine magnetizes aluminum and flings it into a different stream. Lasers read the different types of plastics and sort them into their appropriate streams.

In what feels like a choreographed dance, Recology trucks deliver new loads of recyclables into a mountainous pile. The pile was white before the pandemic, but the Amazonification of our lives turned it brown. It has stayed brown. Thick, black cobwebs cover the ceiling. A pile of real, non-recyclable trash—the rejected attempts at recycling found through sorting—lies next to the machine. Sometimes, it moves. Because of the rats. Seattle’s Material Recovery Facility (MRF) is a cacophonic, colorful symphony of industry, and it almost never stops—because the trash never stops. That symphony is the focal point of Recology’s annual artist-in-residence program.

Since 2015, Recology has chosen two artists annually for a four-month residency in their artist-in-residence (AIR) program. Earning a $1,300 monthly stipend, artists gain unfettered, 24/7 access to the MRF and all of its materials to create artwork that they’ll showcase at the end of the program. They can also scavenge for materials at the City of Seattle’s North Transfer Center and Recology’s stores, where hard-to-recycle material ends up. Recology educates the artists on the facility and recycling. They lead facility tours and become intertwined with the inner machinations of the recycling center.

In years past, artists have made Mondrian-style sculptures from the soles of unrecyclable shoes. Others have recovered spools of metal shower hoses and conduits, weaving them together into sculptures. One artist abandoned her original idea after spending hours on end at the MRF and instead made 3D-printed casts of the sorters’ hands.

The MRF is a treasure trove for artists, both with the material and inspiration it provides. In a world on the brink of climate disaster, having artists immersed in one aspect of sustainability and communicating their experience through their work is a necessary kind of outreach. “What an individual artist can do in this program is give exposure [to sustainability] through their art or just talking about it,” says Amanda Manitach, artist and Recology AIR program manager.

When 2019 resident Susan Robb wove a blanket to commemorate the unrecyclable syringes, or “sharps,” she exposed the sheer volume of used needles being thrown away in the recycling. Whenever workers encounter sharps on the line at the MRF, the facility enacts a safety protocol, and they must note the day and the number of sharps recovered. Robb used plastic bags in her weaving, where each color corresponded to how many sharps were found on a particular day. Some days, they find more than 1,000.

With 300 tons of recycling churning through every day, the MRF sees a lot of trash. And, while Seattle is one of the top three recycling cities in the nation, not everyone recycles well. People toss in questionable material all the time. Once someone puts their recyclables into that blue bin, it’s no longer their problem. But it does become the MRF’s problem.

Maria Phillips, a program manager for Recology’s AIR, and an alumni of the program, focused her work during her residency on the unrecyclable plastic linings of to-go cups. “They’re a multi-layer material of plastic and paper,” Phillips says. “We’re told that they can be recycled.” They can’t be.

For her artwork, Phillips pulled apart the plastic and the paper in these cups to make pure paper and pure plastic. “I was trying to expose some of the greenwashing that goes on,” she says. After her show, some people came up to her and told her they wouldn’t get to-go cups anymore. She considered that a small victory.

The residency is often transformative for the artists.

“It gets into your soul after being here for four months,” says Manitach, who was one of 2023’s resident artists. She made collages out of cardboard and other recycled paper products. She spent hours next to the conveyor belt, picking through letters, boxes, and other perplexing things people threw away. One time, she found a trove of legal documents from the 1960s. Another time, a sex doll came down the line. The workers quickly pulled it.

“Actually being here and being in the [MRF] shifted my whole understanding of material on this almost spiritual level,” Manitach says. There was so much of it. The trash felt Sisyphean. Manitach described it as an “emotional heaviness.”

Before Phillips’ residency, she worked with found objects, so the residency program, where she could sift through other people’s trash, seemed like a perfect fit. “It was one thing to find something on the ground that has a character or texture versus all of a sudden being submerged in it,” she said. Instead of finding one cap and using it, she was surrounded by thousands of those same caps.

Being at the MRF showed them how important it is to communicate about what is and isn’t recyclable. It also taught Manitach how much individual action matters. “I came away from this experience wanting to preach at everyone that your individual footprint does make a difference,” she said. Your K-cups, your sneakers, your bagfuls of shredded paper are being pulled by hand from the rivers of material because they cannot be recycled. “Every single object is being held,” Manitach says. “We can all do better.”

This year, Recology selected artists Colleen Louise Barry and Julia Monté for the program that will kick off in May. Both are excited about the journey awaiting them at the MRF. They’ll display their works in September.

Monté regularly uses found materials in her sculptural work that emulates highway overpasses and rollercoasters. In her current iterations of these both whimsical and brutalist structures, Monté coats them in layers of mortar. For her residency with Recology, she wants to go back to letting the found, raw material shine. “I want to consider how I can make what I’m making now about transit and communal experiences and the precarity of those structures by letting the material be what it is,” Monté says.

Barry, an artist, writer, and teacher with a strong background in sculpture, was wowed by the MRF. “The MRF feels like a character, and she’s got big, hairy grandmother energy,” Barry says. “And it’s really intense because you walk in and all the detritus from all these people’s lives— baby formula, freaking memory boxes still full of pictures, people’s plastic from Trader Joe’s—all these things that we’re living with have all come to this one spot to meet their end.”

Inspired by her recent pregnancy, Barry wants to focus on feminine energy and cycles in her work for the residency. “I came into this with the idea of wanting to talk about circular economies and wanting to talk about cycles being inherently feminine energy, and wanting to make work about that kind of movement,” she said.

She envisions making giant, feminine sculptures from whatever she can scavenge. “I want them to feel big and imposing like the MRF and have a lot of movement and be sort of feminine divine,” she said. “I want them to feel a little scary.”

Of course, everything can change once they’re there and in the mix. Whatever they do, it’ll be important for Recology’s mission and may make a difference in how people consume and how they discard.

“Artists are the seeds,” Phillips says. “We’re the messengers.”