Everything about Materials Recovery Facility totally explained
A
materials recovery facility or
materials reclamation facility (
MRF -- pronounced "murf") is a specialized plant that receives, separates and prepares recyclable materials for marketing to end-user manufacturers. Generally, there are two types -
clean and
dirty MRF's.
Clean MRF
A
clean MRF accepts
recyclable commingled materials that have been collected from
curbside collection separated at source from municipal solid waste generated by either residential or commercial sources. There are a variety of clean MRF's. The most common currently are 2-stream MRF's, where source-separated recyclables are delivered in the form of a mixed food and beverage container stream (typically glass,
ferrous metal,
aluminum and other non-ferrous metals,
PET [No.1] and
HDPE [No.2] plastics) and a mixed paper stream.
The composition of the mixed paper stream can vary considerably, depending on the marketing arrangements that are available to the MRF operator. A typical mixed paper stream will consist of old newspapers with their inserts, old magazines and kraft (brown) paper bags. Some MRF's are able to handle a mixed paper stream consisting of a wider variety of paper types that includes old corrugated, junk mail, telephone books and even paperboard.
Dirty MRF
A
dirty MRF accepts a mixed solid waste stream and then proceeds to separate out designated recyclable materials through a combination of manual and mechanical sorting. The sorted recyclable materials may undergo further processing required to meet technical specifications established by end-markets while the balance of the mixed waste stream is sent to a disposal facility such as a landfill.
The percentage of residuals (unrecoverable recyclable or non-program materials) from a properly operated clean MRF supported by an effective public outreach and education program shouldn't exceed 10% by weight of the total delivered stream and in many cases it can be significantly below 5%. A dirty MRF recovers between 5% and 45% of the incoming material as recyclables, then the remainder is landfilled or otherwise disposed.
Wet MRF
New
mechanical biological treatment technologies are now beginning to utilise
wet MRFs. This combines a dirty MRF with water which acts to density separate and clean the output streams. It also hydrocrushes and dissolves biodegradable organics in solution to make them suitable for
anaerobic digestion.
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