Mata Turoa rummages through a lot of unpleasant and dangerous things when working on the presort line Auckland’s biggest recycling centre but the day she found a kitten on a conveyor is one she’ll never forget.

The tiny animal was sat out of place alongside beer cans, milk bottles and cardboard boxes.

Turoa adopted the kitten. It now lives with her at her home in Manukau.

Her workplace is where all the contents from recycling bins across Auckland are dropped off - between 500 and 600 tonnes a day.

Turoa’s is part of the team that sifts through the material as it moves down a conveyor belt.

She picks stuff out that should not be there, including kittens - Turoa’s new pet remarkably survived being squashed inside a truck and dumped at the recycling centre before making its way up the conveyor belt.

And the kitten’s not alone.

Roughly 30% of what’s collected should not have been recycled in the first place. Once Turoa, her colleagues and other machines pick out the un-recyclable material, it gets squashed up, put back on a truck and taken to a waste facility.

When Stuff spent a day with Turoa, she had already been working for five hours. She’s been doing doing it for almost eight years.

“I get up in the morning at about 4am, get ready, come to work by 4.30am and start working at 5am,” Turoa said, as she enjoyed a coffee break.

“The first thing we do in the morning is .... clean the whole plant until we wait for products to come in.”

Once the trucks turn up, and the contents are unloaded, Turoa and her co-workers spring into action.

“As you can see that we sort out all the waste that's not recyclable and we throw it down the chute,” she said.

With their hands, or a hook, they pull off plastic bags and assorted rubbish.

It may sound like repetitive work, but a lot of the staff have been there for many years.

There’s a rule of thumb - if someone can stick it out for a couple of weeks, they’ll stay for years.

One of Turoa’s colleagues is 71 and could retire, but enjoys the work and team spirit.

Bu there are some down sides - some of the things people chuck in their recycling bin.

“It's not very nice,” Turoa said.

“Nappies, car batteries, LPG gas bottles, laptops, phones, anything electrical.”

In one corner of the recycling centre, there’s a large pile of laptops. Turoa has to pull these out when she sees them, as the batteries inside can cause fires.

There are also about a dozen car batteries that have been plucked out by the presort team over the last few weeks, and there’s also a pile of gas cylinders which people have chucked into their recycling bins, and worryingly, they’re not always empty.

Fires, caused by lithium batteries, are a common concern at the recycling centre - there has been three in the last six months.

Outside work, Turoa has become a recycling aficionado.

None of her friends would dare put any rubbish in the incorrect bin.

“I see a lot of my family do that, and then I'll tell them off,” she laughed.