manager Mr. Llewellyn Butterfield.

"I like to be doing something not everyone else is doing,'' he said. Mr.

Butterfield supervises 10 full-time employees. "Most of our staff are young people, who are learning from the bottom about the recycling business,'' he said.

The recycling process was actually quite simple, he explained. When recyclables arrive at the plant, they are dumped in a storage area.

Then the bags are loaded into a hopper before everything is put onto conveyor belts for hand-sorting. Steel cans are extracted by magnet.

At times, garbage gets into the stream and has to be thrown away. But Mr.

Butterfield said the problem had been much worse when the programme was in its infancy and people were not sure what could be recycled.

Glass goes straight into the glass crusher. "We don't have the facilities to melt glass,'' he said.

Aluminium and steel are compressed into separate "bales'' which are shipped out weekly to plants in New Jersey and New York. Paper is all shredded and sold to local farmers for animal bedding.

"It's basically pretty straightforward,'' said Mr. Butterfield. "It's just a matter of making a judgment on future volumes.

"The participation level is not as high as it could be. The plant may eventually have to be extended.'' Mr. Butterfield said the plant had been under his control since March, 1992.

He and his staff took part in a "crash course'' in recycling, travelling abroad to see plants in operation and to attend conferences.

Recycling was especially well developed in New York and New Jersey, he said, "because they don't have any choice.'' Bermuda, too, had no choice about recycling, he said, because of the lack of landfill space.

Initially, the plant was handling under 20 tons a month of recyclables, he recalled. But that had now increased to 120 tons.

Mr. Butterfield said he wished people would rinse out their recyclables, as sometimes tins contained "too much food sediment'' for them to be recycled.

Only a certain level of impurities was allowed, he said.

"The recycling business is in its infancy. We're going to need a lot more space in the future,'' he predicted.

"We're helping the environment and this is a growth industry.''