As soon as we go through the door into an enormous, endless warehouse, it is impossibly loud: a racket of noise and garbage, tiny pieces of paper flying around like dirty magic dust. The tour guide leads us down some metal stairs and along a pathway that cuts through the middle of it all, on one side forklifts raking and lifting piles of junk mail three stories high—a pyramid of paper—and enormous bound cubes of crushed cans like metal haystacks are being somehow organized on the other side. The tour guide shouts at us from the front of the line, but I hear nothing. I look at a woman working a switchboard of machinery in a cagelike contraption to my right. She wears her hair back in a ponytail and has on the same glasses we all do. She smiles at me and returns to her work, pulling switches and dials in the world’s filthiest video game.

We continue up more clanky metal stairs and across a metal bridge that oversees the whole operation. Below us, conveyor belts covered in trash move at a remarkable clip while workers pick off the occasional piece and throw it into a bin behind them without looking. Juice boxes and bags and broken toys and cans and long tangled jumbles of ribbon and plastic rings for pop and twisted pieces of metal and more, more, more. We clump down the stairs and file in behind the sorting line, which is what it is called, to watch. I catch a snatch of information shouted from our tour guide about how their job is to pull anything that isn’t plastic from the line. I watch as employees, bored from hours and days and years of this job, methodically pick through the wave of crap that whizzes in front of them. They are missing so much, so many pieces that aren’t plastic, and some small obsessive-compulsive part of me is seizing up. There, there, there, that piece, what about that, quick. But they are accustomed to the job, I suspect, and so they move at a measured pace. Each person has a large bin behind them, and some of these are decorated with mascots and treasures that must have been pulled from the line. On one, there is a Barbie horse—a white one, with silvery hair. It’s scuffed and the hair is tangled, but I could totally see why it was saved, and it makes me kind of sad. We keep walking.