The City of Houston (COH) has approved a new 20 year contract for its curbside recycling program with FCC Environmental Services, which is the U.S. subsidiary of FCC (Fomento de Construcciones & Contratas), a global environmental services and infrastructure company.  FCC Environmental has secured contracts to operate recycling services for several Texas cities, including Dallas, Garland, and Mesquite. (The current City of Houston contract is with Waste Management). 

The expected benefits of this new contract with FCC will be the return of curbside glass recycling, single-use plastic bag recycling, and the inclusion of additional plastic types (it appears that hard plastic #6 would be accepted; but not styrofoam).  FCC Environmental Services will build a new municipal recycling processing facility near the existing McCarty Road landfill. The contract also includes some components for public education, and an education center is expected to be built as part of the new processing facility (more info in links below). It should take an estimated 14 months to build the new facility and begin operations - meaning a likely start date in mid 2019.

A new FCC recycling facility in Dallas started operations in January, 2017.  Below is a link to further information describing the Dallas facility. The facility that FCC would build in Houston would likely be very similar.

Link to info about Dallas facility:

http://fccenvironmental.com/2017/01/09/dallas-mrf-starts-operations/ 

And here is a video of the new Dallas facility with some good visuals:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skrA0iOhw2c   

FYI, here is a video of the actual FCC sorting process in Dallas with some labeled descriptions of the equipment.  Bollegraaf is the equipment manufacturer: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiyE813GrBE   

For comments or questions about this topic, contact Frank Blake at frankblake@juno.com