"Recycle Your What?"

There seems to be a question about recycling where I live. At least I have a question?..I remember when I was a kid. Once a week my Dad put these 2 galvanized garbage cans into the trunk of his car. He had to tie the trunk lid down because they wouldn't fit. We went to a place called a dump. It was on a very bumpy dirt road in my town. Its Called Hathaway St. now. We had to go really slow down this road and Dad got mad if the car made a funny noise. There is a ball park and play ground there now. The town built those things on top of the dump. It was on Reed Ave in Windsor Locks Connecticut. He would back up his car up to a fly infested pile of trash get out of the car and empty the cans...I would wait in the car because he said he didn't want me to step on any glass. When we left that place the car would be filled with fly's...That is my memory of our local dump...Now its called recycling... Not to long ago I took ride on my bike to the recycling center in Suffield Conn. Its a huge facility that receives the garbage from the surrounding communities. Those big garbage trucks you see a few times a week on your street back into these places and dump their load onto conveyor belts to be separated by workers (humans) and sent to different places in this huge trash factory . For example, plastic with plastic, aluminum with aluminum and glass with glass. The rest of the trash like paper and other things is sent to a special place in this factory. In other words nothing is actually thrown away. Everything is, to put it bluntly, recycled...I wonder who paid to build these places and who works there? Another question here is who is making money on the things you throw away? I seen freight car loads of shredded aluminum and plastic going somewhere...They want you to separate this stuff. Why?  Do you separate your trash and garbage for them? Do you get paid for doing this? Why, do you do this if someone does for you?