Consumers can deposit their empty aluminum cans and PET plastic beverage bottles onto the Reimagine intake tray. There’s no need to sort them first – Reimagine will take care of that.

As containers go into Reimagine, they are fed onto a vertical conveyor belt. While moving up the conveyor, the material of each container is verified by a series of optical scanners.

If a container isn’t made of aluminum or PET plastic, it is pushed by a burst of air off the conveyor and into a reject bin.

If a container is made of aluminum, it is blown onto a horizontal conveyor and travels to a can crusher.

The crushed cans are dropped into a holding bin.

Reimagine can store up to 65,000 crushed cans. More than 95% of those cans will be remade into new cans and can be back on store shelves in as little as 60 days.

Bottles made with #1 PET plastic continue up the vertical conveyor. When they get to the top, they travel along a horizontal conveyor towards the bottle crusher.

After they’ve been crushed, the bottles drop into one of two bottle bins.

Reimagine can store up to 18,000 bottles. These bottles will be made into new products you might never imagine – like clothing, backpacks, carpet, and even new bottles.

Overnight, a Reimagine truck empties the bins and delivers the crushed containers to an aluminum or plastic processor so they can be remade into new products.