NAZARETH, Pa. – Although Robert Perrone is a fan of “The Gates,” their hue is getting to him. “I’m really, really, really sick of orange,” he said. “I see it everywhere.”

He also hears “The Gates,” feels them, and most likely breathes them. Mr. Perrone is project coordinator for “The Gates” at Nicos Polymers and Grinding Inc., an industrial-reprocessing facility that is handling all of the plastic used in Christo’s Central Park dress-up.

The transformation of the PVC-plastic arches, and the nylon curtains that once flapped beneath them, is dramatic. Unloaded by forklifts from trailers at Nicos’s plant – 30,000 to 40,000 pounds in each trailer load, by Mr. Perrone’s estimate – the vertical components of the gates are stacked neatly to await their rendezvous with destiny, and industrial grinding. Those “verticals,” as Mr. Perrone called them, began to arrive Thursday. The horizontal crosspieces and fabric have yet to make their way to eastern Pennsylvania.

When the nylon arrives, Mr. Perrone said, it will be shredded and compressed into bales, which Nicos will then sell to manufacturers. The nylon will be melted and spun into new fiber. After that, the possibilities are nearly limitless.

“You could be wearing a nylon jacket next year that’s purple that was actually once part of ‘The Gates,’ ” Mr. Perrone said.

In the meantime, the verticals are meeting an “extremely violent” end, he said. Yesterday afternoon, that demise came at the hands of the machine operator Gilberto Mendez and one of Nicos’s 18 Cumberland grinders, in a procedure Mr. Perrone fondly labeled the “chuck and duck.”

Standing before a long metal chute used to feed materials into the grinder – without which pieces of “The Gates” would go flying uncontrollably as they met the whirring blades fueled by an engine with as much as 475 horsepower – Mr. Mendez tapped each vertical against the floor, checking one last time to make sure no contaminants or debris would make their way into the machinery.

Then, like Zeus poised to hurl a lightning bolt, Mr. Mendez tossed a vertical into the chute. Against its metallic sides, the plastic shaft thrashed violently upon encountering the blades, releasing a thunderous crash.

In Central Park, the sound of “The Gates” was of tangerine fabric gently flapping in the breeze. In Nazareth, it is the deafening cacophony of industrial grade destruction.

Seconds later, the once-imposing verticals were nearly unrecognizable, reduced to tiny plastic chunks that began streaming into a large cardboard container. Mr. Perrone plunged his hand into the growing mound of regrind, demonstrating its consistency, which was roughly that of traffic cone-colored kitty litter. Soon a fine orange powder began to fill the air, accumulating on the machinery, on the floor, on clothes, and in hair. And so it was that “The Gates” ended up on the orange dust heap of art history, consigned to a cardboard urn.

That trademark pigmentation, which will be forever associated with public memory of “The Gates,” may enjoy similar longevity in reprocessed PVC.

“Orange in plastics is probably one of the hardest colors to change,” Mr. Perrone said.

While “there’s no way” the transformed gates will ever be white, he explained, sophisticated blending processes could make them black, or at least gray, to allow for a wider variety of uses.

They could also remain tangerine: While PVC pipe is white or black in America, in other parts of the world orange pipe is considered desirable because of its visibility, Mr. Perrone said. European and South American manufacturers, he said, have shown interest in buying the “Gates” regrind, which still is being bid on.

Will the origin of the plastic chunks as a much-debated display of public art enhance their appeal to prospective buyers? Unlikely, according to Mr. Perrone, who said the main concern of potential buyers is getting high-quality plastic regrind to melt down and reshape into pipes, or paint-roller handles, or flower pots, or storm-surge barriers, or whatever other end they can dream up for “The Gates.”

To many of the 75 employees of Nicos, too, destroying “The Gates” is strictly business. Mr. Mendez was indifferent to the plastic’s place in the artistic canon – he hadn’t even seen images of “The Gates” intact. One of Nicos’s supervisors, Ever Reyes, said he had seen pictures of them on the Internet and was a little sad to be destroying them. But not too sad. It’s “just a job,” Mr. Reyes said.

Mr. Perrone, too, said much of the work surrounding the reprocessing of “The Gates” was business as usual. Indeed, it was Nicos’s reputation for excellence in certified destruction that landed the corporation the job with Christo and Jeanne-Claude in the first place, he said. The company had been referred to the artist by Hugo Neu Schnitzer East, the Jersey City firm Christo and Jeanne-Claude selected to recycle the metal components of “The Gates,” Mr. Perrone said.

Nicos takes its commitment to the complete destruction of “The Gates” very seriously, the project director added, identifying some of the measures by which it documents the reprocessing. As a rule, customers are invited to witness the destruction at the Nicos plant, Mr. Perrone said. The company also compiles photographic evidence and maintains an exhaustive database that tracks materials from the moment they’re unloaded in Nazareth until they leave on customers’ trucks. Preprocessing and post-processing weights are measured on state-certified scales, he said, adding: “We’re accountable for every ounce we process.”

Because of the size of Nicos’s plant and its remanufacturing capacity – one of the highest in the industry, Mr. Perrone said – the company is also able to maintain tight security around the project, which he touted as near-impenetrable. If a piece of “The Gates” shows up on e-Bay, Mr. Perrone said, “It wasn’t us.”

Employees of “The Gates” project are responsible for the dismantling and loading in Central Park, and the plastics are being transported to Nazareth by Galasso Trucking, headquartered in Maspeth, Queens.

Because of the insistence of Christo and Jeanne-Claude that “The Gates” be recycled entirely, and that there be no souvenirs, or “relics,” as Mr. Perrone described them, it is “a grueling project, because there’s a lot riding on it – it’s very much in the public eye.” The public aspect of the work, however, has its benefits. While Nicos expects to turn a smaller than usual profit on the plastic, the free publicity is most valuable, Mr. Perrone said, beaming proudly when recounting Nicos’s front-page, four-color treatment in Plastics News.

And then there’s the less quantifiable benefit of meeting the work’s creators. Although “Christo doesn’t talk much,” Mr. Perrone said, he and his wife “are very nice people.”

“It’s been an absolute pleasure to work with them,” Mr. Perrone said.

And, perhaps, to collaborate with them.

Because the ephemeral nature of “The Gates” is part of the couple’s artistic conception of the project, is Nicos – and the process of shredding, grinding, pulverizing, and melting – part of the art?

“You can look at it that way,” Mr. Perrone said.