With fifteen years prefix = st1 /Britainand other nations should be well on with the building of huge industrial complexes for the recycling of waste . The word rubbish could lose its meaning because everything which goes into the dumps would be made into something useful . Even the most dangerous and unpleasant wastes would provide energy if nothing else . The latest project is to take a city of around half a million inhabitants and discover exactly what raw materials go into it and what go out . The aim is to find out how much of these raw materials could be provided if a plant for recycling waste were built just outside the city . This plant would recycle not only metal such as steel , lead and copper , but also paper and rubber as well . Another new project is being set up to discover the best ways of sorting and separating the rubbish . When this project is complete , the rubbish will be processed like this : First , it will pass through sharp metal bars which will tear open the plastic bags in which rubbish is usually packed ; then it will pass through a powerful fan to separate the lightest elements from the heavy solids ; after that founders and rollers will break up everything that can be broken . Finally , the rubbish will pass under magnets  , which will remove the bits of iron and steel ; the rubber and plastic will then be sorted out in the final stage . The first full-scale giant recycling plants are perhaps fifteen years away . Indeed , with the growing cost of transporting rubbish to more distant dumps , some big cities will be forced to build their own recycling plants before long . The first full-scale huge recycling plants_.
began to operate fifteen years ago will probably take less than fifteen years to build will be built fifteen years later will probably be in operation in fifteen years