Tour Time: the Murf

Have you ever wondered what the material recycling facility looks like?

Well, if you have, it is your lucky day! Here is what touring the facilities here are RIRRC looks like from my point of view:

I will start with what a tour of the Materials recycling facility.

The Material Recycling Facility is fondly referred to as "the Murf". This is where are all your mixed recycling goes to be processed. The hauler that picks up your recycling brings it here to RIRRC, where it gets dumped onto the tip floor of the Murf. Here, there are workers to inspect the loads to make sure that there is not too much contamination (the goal is less than 10% contamination per load) in the recycling, meaning residents put too much trash into their recycling bins/carts. If the load looks good, payloaders are used to put the recyclable materials into the first piece of sorting equipment, the drum feeder. This machine "fluffs up" the material and allows the correct amount of material to move on to the next phase, which is the pre-sort. The pre-sort phase is meant to for employees to take out materials that should never end up in recycling, some of the main items being plastic bags, scrap metals, clothing hangers, etc... Once the materials are cleaned up, they start their sorting process through a series of sorting tools/machines:

Star screens: these use spinning rubber "stars" that separate out the desired materials, for example, the plastic from cardboard and paper.

Optical sorters: these are machines that are can sort out the plastic containers by the light that reflects off of them, so it knows if a container is a milk jug versus a laundry detergent container.

Eddy current: this is the part of the sorting that will separate out the aluminum products, such as your cans, lids and bottle caps using magnets to create a rotating magnetic field, allowing the aluminium to be captured. (any metal containing steel or iron has already been removed by an overhead magnet before the materials get to the eddy current stage)

Along with all of this high tech, mechanical sorting equipment, I cannot forget to mention the hard working employees that work along the conveyor belts in the Murf who are constantly pulling materials that do not belong in recycling in general (like those pesky plastic bags) or materials that the mechanical separators sent to the wrong conveyor belt (in which case they send to the proper area of the Murf).

The recyclable materials make it through the maze of sorting machines and conveyor belts and are bailed with like items to be sold to a vendor that can use it to make new products!

Here are some photos from my tour of the Murf, I hope you enjoy:

This is an image of the tip floor, with a payloader getting ready to add material to the presort container.

This is the slowest moving conveyor belt in the MRF because cardboard is such a valuable commodity.

This image is showing the various conveyor belts of materials.

Remember when I referred to it as a maze?

This is an image of what the glass that you recycle end up looking like. It will soon be used as part of the daily cover material at the landfill.

This picture captures the end of the process in the MRF with the two conveyor belts heading to get baled, as well as showing the baled material on the floor.

This is a very simple explanation of a complicated topic, but if you if would like to learn more, there is a great explanation of what happens at the Murf, as well as the other operations at RIRRC on the website, click here. Or better yet, you can schedule a tour to see it for yourself!