BROWARD COUNTY, Fla. — It’s being called a game changer for South Florida.

Waste Management has officially unveiled its new $90 million, 127,000-square-foot recycling facility in West Pembroke Pines. The plant is designed to recycle 275,000 tons of material each year at a rate of 60 tons per hour.

The facility will service Miami-Dade, Broward, Monroe and Collier counties at a time when South Florida is facing a waste management crisis.

Available landfill space is quickly approaching capacity, forcing leaders to rethink how trash is handled as the world works to reduce emissions tied to climate change.

“We want to show you that recycling is real and that everyone should be recycling always,” said Tara Hemmer, WM’s senior vice president and chief sustainability officer.

Beam Furr, vice chair of the Broward Solid Waste Authority, said the region must take recycling seriously.

“We need to be doing everything we can to recycle everything,” Furr said. “We have to be leading by example. We’re ground zero for sea level rise. Unless we’re doing recycling and unless we’re doing all the right things, we’re contributing to our own demise.”

Furr is helping lead the effort to get Broward’s local cities to sign onto a new master plan aimed at standardizing and streamlining how the county manages waste in the future.

“We’re looking to get up to 75% recycling. Right now we’re like in the 30s. This is going to help us get there. So, this is a big step forward,” Furr said.

Broward, like Miami-Dade County, produces more than 5 million tons of waste a year -- double the national average. The goal is to reduce as much waste as possible from going to landfills.

The new facility is mostly automated and uses new technology, much of it AI-enabled, to minimize the manpower needed to sort materials and make the process more efficient.

“We have dozens of optical sorters, and what those do is they shine light on objects and then can blow them into a bunker where we can get them to new markets,” Hemmer said.

Officials hope the facility -- one of the largest in the country -- will help regain public trust in recycling after high contamination rates forced many cities to stop offering the service because of high costs.

“Many cities thought that they could do better by breaking off and going their own way, sending their garbage all over the state and doing their own deal, only to find out that not only were they overpaying by a considerable amount,” Furr said.

Education will be key moving forward.

“So everybody knows what goes in there, we’re going to have to find a way to make sure that we’re separating stuff, separating yard waste, separating food waste, and then the stuff that goes here can really be recycled,” Furr said.

Mark Wilson, president of the Florida Chamber of Commerce, said the region has an opportunity to set an example.

“We can show the rest of the country how to do sustainability the right way,” Wilson said.

Broward’s Solid Waste Authority master plan has been presented to city managers countywide. Beginning in April, each city will decide whether to sign on. The authority is urging all 28 member cities to adopt it by August.

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