‘State of the art’ recycling plant gets landscaping love from Pembroke Pines students
If you’re wondering how the average Pembroke Pines Charter High science student spent their Thursday morning, don’t expect to hear of classrooms or desks.
They might just surprise you with talk of shovels, hard hats, heavy machinery and a mission to restore Florida’s biodiversity, one plant at a time.
Forty of the school’s Advanced Placement Environmental Science students participated in a Nov. 6 microhabitat planting event to celebrate the upcoming launch of the city’s newest recycling facility, owned and operated by Waste Management.
The goal? To gain hands-on experience with local wildlife advocacy while learning about what it takes to run what WM is calling its most “technology-advanced” plant .
“We’re really pleased to have the students out here, it’s a teaching moment for them,” said Dawn McCormick, a WM spokesperson. “They’re learning about what it takes to put programs like this together.”
The microhabitat, located at 1285 SW 208th Ave., is WM’s fifth partnership with nonprofit Tandem Global to “promote sustainability, wildlife preservation, biodiversity and environmental education” by transforming excess land on its plot into certified wildlife habitats.
Roughly the size of a tennis court, it spans the western perimeter of the facility, just miles from the Everglades.
The microhabitat’s design follow’s the Miyawaki method — a botany technique that creates dense “pocket forests” filled with a high diversity of native species — and was created to support the neighboring national park’s wildlife by attracting essential insects.
“We’re having a more targeted impact here as well, even though it’s a lot smaller,” said Abby McBride, a biodiversity and business consultant for Tandem Global. “Even though we aren’t providing enough space for some species, we are providing a great food source for them.”
Among the native flora students planted were native milkweed — the sole host plant for the Monarch butterfly, which could soon be listed as a “threatened species” — and red maples, which support over 200 species of caterpillars.
But the microhabitat is simply a fraction of what the WM Recycling South Florida facility will achieve for local sustainability efforts, said Andres Limones Cruz, the company’s government affairs manager.
The plant’s “state of the art” technology is equipped to parse through a bin’s contaminated items — such as containers with food waste or plastics unsuitable for recycling — and process as many recyclables as possible for Miami-Dade, Broward, Monroe and Collier counties.
That looks like 17 optical sorters that can distinguish the composition of an item and a streamlined conveyor belt system to maximize efficiency.
“The objective is that anything that comes through this process, there’s a 95% output of recyclables,” Limones Cruz said. “So anything that comes from here, we don’t lose more than 5%. The idea is to make that number smaller.”
The facility, which opens in January 2026 and will replace the outdated Reuter Recycling plant, also features a glass-paneled “education room” that will host local community groups for hands-on learning about the recycling process.
Interactive screens, educational videos and displays of WM materials are some of the experiences Limones Cruz says visitors can expect.
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Robert Probel, Broward College’s senior director of environmental safety and chief fire official, is hoping to bring his own cohort of students when the facility opens.
He’s hopeful the plant will deliver on creating sustainability education opportunities.
“We come to [WM’s facility] because we have a recycling program at the college. ... We want to expand our program for the kids and to get as many people involved is the best thing.”
This story was originally published November 6, 2025 at 3:18 PM.
