The Magic of the MRF - Helping business move closer to zero waste to landfill

Do you want your business to do its best in terms of recycling, but find it difficult to manage the additional work involved in pre-sorting and waste segregation? If this description fits you, there is a recycling solution available in the form of the dirty or mixed MRF.

Dirty or mixed wet MRFs (Materials Recycling Facilities) take unsegregated waste and require no pre-sorting, unlike ‘clean’ MRFs which are used solely for household and domestic waste and which can only deal with the pre-segregated recyclables from kerbside recycling schemes.

Cawleys’ MRF is designed to deal with all commercial and industrial waste streams and following its recent £3 million investment in a semi-automated system, Cawleys aims to recover at least sixty per cent of all the waste it collects and for some sectors, for example the construction industry, this could be as much as eighty-five per cent.

Some of the more common materials that will be recovered in the diry MRF from a mixed general waste load include:

• Paper
• Cardboard
• Metals
• Plastic
• Wood
• Inert waste (soils, bricks, etc.)

The process

Once the client’s waste has been tipped into a storage bay, it is slowly fed onto a series of conveyor belts to begin its trip around the facility. Each area in the plant helps to separate one type of recyclable material from another. There are a number of different ways in which this happens:

• Screens/trommels can help to remove the larger pieces of recyclables
• Magnetic separation can remove the ferrous metals (cans made of tin)
• Optical separation can separate certain types of plastics such as the different types of plastic bottles that can be collected
• Air classification can help to separate light and heavy materials (paper for example)

Recycling and reprocessing

Each of the material streams is collected independently at the end of the MRF and can be compacted and baled. This way materials can be transported easily and then taken to a reprocessing facility. Once separated, the materials can go on for further recycling. For example the glass collected will go on to a re-processor where it be used as low grade aggregate (a material often used in the construction of roads as a substitute for sand) and the cardboard goes onto a UK paper mill to make new cardboard.

Using mixed MRFs such as Cawleys will enable your business to meet its recycling and sustainability targets without the expense or hassle of presegretating your waste on-site doing both your business and the environment a big favour.

For more information on how using Cawleys MRF might help you, see: www.cawleys.co.uk [2]