GLASS jars bob along a conveyer belt, while old newspapers whizz past on a track below, and plastic bottles are scanned and sorted by lasers.

Welcome to the hi-tech world of recycling.

It’s a far cry from sorting your rubbish into coloured sacks at home.

Yet what you do there has a big part to play in where your rubbish ends up, according to Ann Beavis, of recycling firm Bywaters.

It currently processes 60,000 tonnes of recyclable materials each year - including what you put in your pink sack in Southend - at a recovery facility in Bow, East London.

Ann says: “The site is largely automated to maximise efficiency and recovery rates. It employs state-of-the-art technology to recover a different material at every point of the process, generating 15 different material streams for recycling.”

Despite some claims recycling has fallen foul of the credit crunch, Ann says we should all keep sorting our rubbish.

“Media coverage of recycling in the UK threatens to undermine consumer confidence and dissuade private and commercial recycling by claiming the market has died,” she says. “But any assertion there is no market for recovered paper and that consumers are wasting their time by recycling could not be further from the truth.

“Even in the current difficult market conditions Bywaters continues to produce high quality recovered recycled products, products that remain in continuous demand in the UK, Europe and Asia.

“More than 95 per cent of all material delivered to Bywaters at Bow is recycled and therefore diverted away from landfill.”

With landfill sites overflowing, councils are keener than ever to encourage residents to recycle their waste and actually understand what happens to recyclables when they leave the kerbside.

I joined a group of Southend residents, recently recruited by Southend Council and its waste contractor Cory Environmental as voluntary recycling champions, to find out what happens to turn our trash into cash.

Southend Council and its waste contractor Cory Environmental provide a pink sack recycling service and a food waste collection.

Southend residents achieved a recycling rate of 40 per cent in the last year, and currently recycle 280 tonnes of food waste a month.

All the pink sacks householders fill with recyclables every week are transported to the plant, which uses cutting-edge technology to separate paper, cardboard, cans, plastics and glass.

Once the waste is sorted it is sent to UK companies for reuse.

Ian Robertson, Southend councillor responsible for public protection and waste, says: “We attach great importance to knowing where materials end up and this is proof the rubbish you take such great efforts to sort, does not end up in landfill.

“This material really does have a second life.”

The facility reduces mountains of waste into separate materials, valuable resources that go back into the manufacturing process.

Nora Goodman, from Eastwood, is one of the council’s recycling champions and encourages others in her street to “think pink”.

She says: “I wouldn’t throw anything away if I could avoid it.

“I’m definitely noticing more and more of the pink sacks going out recently than black bags, so people are getting better at it.

“Once they get into the habit of doing it, it’s very simple and once you start recycling you quickly start trying to save energy in other ways.

“For me recycling is so important because it reduces the amount of landfill and we are fast running out of space.”