The process begins with a bottle tossed absentmindedly into a recycling bin.

But this is only the beginning of its journey. Along with the rest of UCLA's massive amount of waste, it will interact with multiple coordinating organizations and sometimes travel thousands of miles.

The double bins have become ubiquitous on campus, beckoning people to throw their plastic bottles, aluminum cans or scrunched-up midterms into the designated container.

Each of the more than 300 trash and recycling bins that litter the university is marked with the same goal: zero waste by 2020.

"It's a bit ambitious," said Jesse Escobar, UCLA's recycling coordinator. "But I think we can do it."

To achieve zero waste, UCLA and the rest of the University of California have developed a plan of action to divert 100 percent of its waste away from landfills using techniques that include bolstered recycling practices.

Inside the bin, the bottle is collected, along with the rest of the recyclables, in a clear plastic bag -- the clear plastic is part of the color coding systems that are pervasive in recycling and waste management.

From there, the bags are collected by UCLA Facilities Management personnel, often driving the white square-paneled metal carts seen buzzing around the university's pathways. The carts putter to a stop at one of the numerous docks associated with specific buildings or one of three centralized pick-up locations scattered in the lots and back ends of campus.

Loads of bags are then dumped into either a recycling compactor or a three-yard metal bin -- both color coded blue -- to await pick up.

Athens Services, a company that specializes in waste management and recycling services, picks up the compactors and bins from campus. But instead of bringing them to the company's own facility, it instead takes them to a small yard off a nondescript street in Santa Monica.

The trucks pull into the location, which is cluttered with waylaid shipping containers and compacted bales of cans stacked like multicolored metallic bricks. This is the home of one of the Allan Company's sorting facilities.

Once there, workers from the Allan Company, a recycling company active in Southern and Central California, evaluate the recyclables taken from UCLA by taking samples and measuring for contaminants.

They then pay a set price for the materials, buying the tons of bottles, cans and paper products generated by the multitudes of people who traverse campus.

In the back of the yard, an immense mound of those same recyclables raises up more than 20-feet high and is picked at by scavenging birds.

The amalgam of detergent bottles, manila envelopes and water bottles is a result of single-stream recycling, which many have touted as the way forward to increase consumer recycling.

The increase in recycling efforts at UCLA, however, goes along with an understanding that recycling itself isn't the best thing to do for sustainability.

"There is a hierarchy in terms of action," said Nurit Katz, UCLA's chief sustainability officer. "With recycling you still have to use other resources and energy in order to take the materials and transform them into other materials."

Katz said a switch to single-stream recycling has made it easier for both members of the campus community and waste management employees to deal with recycling at UCLA.

Single-stream recycling is a system in which all common recyclable materials, like paper, plastic and aluminum, are collected together in the same bin and by extension mixed in the same collection truck.

Katz said before the introduction of single-stream recycling, multiple bins were used for different types of recycling, making it more difficult and inconvenient for students.

Rudy Martin, plant supervisor of the Allan Company's Santa Monica location, said single-stream recycling has practically doubled the amount of material that the location takes in.

However, some are more skeptical of practices like single-stream recycling which emphasize convenience over cautiousness.

The mass of material being sent to sorting plants inevitably leads to unwanted materials getting into the wrong waste streams, said Jerry Powell, executive editor of Resource Recycling, a trade magazine for the recycling industry. For example, wood and non-recyclable materials can get packed in and hidden under huge volumes of paper.

"Single-stream gets more pounds, gets more people to do it, but ends up with more contamination," Powell said. "It's a trade-off."

From the mound, workers pull out and sort material according to different grades, or different categories, of recyclable materials, Martin said. Higher grades correspond to higher-value material.

The top grades are nonfibrous materials such as aluminum cans and plastic bottles. Among the lower-value fibrous materials are items like cardboard and paper.

Even within these categories there are distinctions.

The amount of money that can be received by recycling companies for various grades is related to how much investment is needed to return them back to commodities that can be remade as new products -- often in far away locations like China.

Once the materials are sorted into the various grades, they are baled, stacked and sent out to vendors both domestically and overseas.

A plastic bottle thrown into one of UCLA's recycling bins is likely to end up halfway around the world, used as manufacturing material in China.

According to data from the United States International Trade Commission, scrap and waste was one of the leading exports from the U.S. to China in 2013, netting more than $10 billion.

Because of Southern California's major ports like the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach, much of the state's recycling goes to companies in China.

China holds around a 25 percent market share in U.S. recyclables, meaning one out of every four pounds goes to China, Powell said. In California, one out of every two pounds does.

Powell said China enacted a policy called Operation Green Fence to reject shipping containers that contain too much contamination, after companies used to use shipping containers to send trash and other unwanted materials along with desired recyclables. This led to a marked drop in exports of materials last year.

Despite environmental concerns, trade is integral to both nations' economic prosperity. The scraps and waste that get sent over to China are used as raw materials for new products that get exported back into the United States.

"It's a bit more complicated than this, but the materials we send there, the majority comes right back to us as finished products," Powell said. "Everything from the phone on your desk to the shoebox that packages your new Nikes."

So the plastic bottle thrown away might just turn into a cellphone in a couple of years, but what happens if a recyclable is instead thrown into the trash?

The process starts out pretty much the same. The material gets collected -- this time in black bags instead of clear ones -- and dumped into tan bins and trash compactors in centralized locations around campus.

Athens Services picks up the material and takes it to their facility in the City of Industry, about 45 minutes east of UCLA and practically adjacent to the recently closed Puente Hills Landfill, the largest one in the U.S.

Materials sent to the facility first go through a process called materials recovery, where workers pick through the stream of waste and remove potentially valuable recyclables.

So that plastic bottle might get picked up there, but it's not likely.

Escobar said the percentage of materials that actually ends up recycled from the recycling compactors sent to Allan Company in Santa Monica is more than 90 percent. The trash compactors that get sent to Athens instead hover around 30 percent.

If the bottle goes undetected, there are two options. Either it gets sent to a landfill in San Bernardino County or it goes through a process called waste transformation -- in the case of Athens Services, this means waste is burned.

Waste transformation is one of the many techniques being used to reach UCLA's zero-waste goal and 100 percent diversion from landfill rate, Escobar said.

The trash that gets earmarked for waste transformation gets transported by truck to the Commerce Refuse-to-Energy Facility, a joint project of the City of Commerce and Los Angeles County.

In the facility, the trash gets burned at around 1,800 degrees, heating water that becomes steam which turns a turbine to generate electricity.

"The description is very simple, but the operation is very, very complicated," Powell said.

There has been vocal concern about the environmental cost of burning waste. Critics have said along with creating energy, the process creates massive pollution in the form of carbon monoxide and particulate matter.

Proponents of waste transformation, including some at UCLA, point out the advantages of energy creation, especially in contrast to the creation of more landfills.

"It's not as good as recycling or reducing, but it's better than a landfill because you're capturing heat energy from that product in a useful way instead of just burying it underground," Katz said.

Waste transformation is parallel to UCLA's own attempts to create energy using waste material.

The university has an energy cogeneration plant, which uses natural gas to create energy, located behind the university police station at UCLA on Westwood Plaza.

The cogeneration in the plant's name comes from the use of excess heat from energy generation for heating and cooling.

Part of the gas that fuels the cogeneration plant is itself taken from the Mountaingate Landfill, located in the canyons above the Getty Center, and is used in the creation of new energy on campus.

"One way to make the impact of landfill a little bit better is as organic material breaks down in a landfill it turns to methane gas and we actually use that," Katz said.

The diverse nature of campus waste leads to different concerns and different procedures for recycling.

Say there's a gummed-up keyboard or an old 20-pound monitor from a professor's office that needs to be recycled. Here things get a little trickier.

Electronic waste -- commonly known as e-waste -- is not considered municipal solid waste because of different requirements for its disposal.

Regardless, there are many efforts to recycle the tons of electronics that get discarded at UCLA.

Unpowered casings of old TVs and computers idle on huge pallets on the grounds of a decommissioned military base in Irvine, the final resting place for most of the 10 to 16 tons of e-waste produced monthly on campus.

UCLA's e-waste is sorted and processed at e-recycling of California in Paramount, then sent to Irvine, said Maureen Craine, vice president of marketing and business development of e-Recycling of California, a company that handles more than 90 percent of UCLA's e-waste.

The process by which electronic waste gets recycled varies based on the kind of material that is sent to the site.

Take an old computer monitor as an example.

The process starts by using things like the serial number to try and identify the make, model and original purchasing location of the product.

From there the monitor gets separated into individual parts. The outer housing unit is torn away from the cathode ray tube, the part that creates the image on the screen. At this point, workers and machines start separating and processing different parts of the monitor, splitting up plastics, metals and glass into categories.

The cathode ray tubes, the most valuable component of the unit, are sent to a smelter that heats the part at temperatures up to 25,000 degrees to remove lead from the tubes.

These unleaded tubes are then generally sold overseas. In India, there is a big market for unleaded cathode ray tubes, Craine said.

Craine said there are specific concerns about ethical electronic recycling because of hazardous materials that go into electronics. Electronic waste often contains toxic chemicals such as the lead in cathode ray tubes.

Barbara Kyle, national coordinator of the Electronics TakeBack Coalition, which promotes responsible recycling in the electronics industry, said many e-waste recycling companies send their waste to developing countries, where it often ends up in outdoor backyard recycling operations close to residential areas.

"There is little in terms of regulations," Kyle said. "Even when a company says they follow all local and federal law, it doesn't mean much since there almost aren't any."

The lack of official regulation has led to attempts by independent organizations to create a voluntary standard for responsible electronic recycling.

E-Recycling of California's Irvine site is certified under the e-Stewards certification program, which gives companies assistance and audits their recycling processes.

Although e-Recycling of California handles electronic recycling of campus electronics, personal e-waste recycling for students, staff and faculty is not covered.

UCLA hosts a S.A.F.E. collection center located on Charles E. Young Drive, for collection of household waste and e-waste, but it only accepts electronic waste one day a week.

E3: Ecology, Economy, Equity, an environmental group at UCLA, has created a program to make up for this gap in the collection of personal e-waste.

The club applied for a grant with the Green Initiative Fund in 2012 to provide the plastic e-waste collection tubs seen in various locations on the Hill and campus, said Jenna Hoover, an e-waste coordinator with E3 and a second-year economics student.

In 2012, the benchmark for landfill diversion for all campuses in the UC was 75 percent, which was met by UCLA. Rates of waste that did not end up in a landfill in 2013 were measured at more than 80 percent.

With greater recycling endeavors comes the necessity to create new ways to divert campus waste.

"Pretty much all the low-hanging fruit has been picked and now it's getting into the nitty-gritty, the actual changing of programs, asking what else can we do," Escobar said.

With the help of an action research team, Escobar is currently in the process of collecting and organizing data using geographic information systems. The information about the recycling and trash cans on campus is being used in order to develop specific and adaptable waste management systems for different areas of campus. The action research team is also charged with making recommendations to clarify the unclear signage on the bins, which often leads to waste being thrown in the wrong containers.

Recycling efforts to push UCLA toward its zero waste goal include both the introduction of more compost bins where food waste is more prevalent, and the piloting of zero waste programs in some of the facilities on campus.

Escobar said education remains one of the major goals of sustainability personnel on campus. He said getting through to people not only that they should recycle, but the reasoning behind it, is vital.

"By this point, everybody's heard about recycling. It's been beaten into our heads our entire life," Escobar said. "I think that the biggest challenge is finding that trigger to motivate them."

Because while the process starts with a bottle thrown in a bin, it only works if it's the right one.