Recology Sonoma Marin opened a new $35 million plant this week that will nearly triple the amount of material it can process each day, allowing it to handle all West Marin’s recycling on site for the first time. “This investment in state-of-the-art technology will give our customers peace of mind that what they put into their blue bin will be properly recycled,” said Logan Harvey, the plant’s senior manager. “Investments like these show that recycling can work.” The old plant only processed one-third of the materials sent by the 13 communities served by Recology Sonoma Marin. The rest was sent to other Bay Area processing facilities. The new plant, also in Santa Rosa, can handle everything sent its way. The facility took 10 months to build and measures 85,000 square feet. It includes 109 conveyor belts with a combined length of 1.58 miles. At the old plant, most of the materials were pulled off the line by people, but the new facility will use both humans and high-tech equipment to separate recyclables. No workers are being laid off. “We’ve increased the head count by two and we may increase it by more because we’re processing so much more material,” Mr. Harvey said. Recology encourages people to make sure anything they place in the blue bin is empty, clean and dry. The plant is equipped with seven optical sorters that use infrared light and air nozzles to sort materials and remove contaminants. They will send clear plastic bottles one way and colored detergent containers another. Steel cans will be picked up by a spinning magnet and placed on one conveyor belt, and another machine will repel aluminum cans and send them in another direction. The new technology will be more efficient at sorting out recyclables from non-recyclable materials, recovering 85 percent of the material that arrives at the plant, up from 75 percent previously. Recology hired a company called Machinex to design and build the facility. “The result of our collaboration is one of the highest-capacity recovery systems on the West Coast,” said the company’s C.E.O., Chris Brown.