A material recovery facility removes and sorts recyclables through the waste stream. This assists eliminate trash in the waste stream. Some of the materials that material recovery facilities sort include cardboard, plastics, glass bottles and jars, cartons, paper materials, metal containers for example steel and aluminum cans and glass bottles and jars.
One of the leading features of a material recovery facility is the fact it may help have the environment clean by encouraging the recycling of recyclable materials. Material recovery facilities either can focus on removing and sorting clean materials or dirty materials. After sorting these materials, a material recovery facility sells them to manufacturers.
There are both small, and large MRFs. These facilities vary in proportion and configuration. Small material recovery facilities usually are not highly automated and handle only a few recyclables while large material recovery facilities handle numerous recyclables and also have highly automated equipment. There are two common forms of material recovery facilities: clean material recovery facilities and dirty material recovery facilities.
Clean Material Recovery Facilities
A clean material recovery facility relates to recyclable materials which were sorted from where they has come from. The trash is sourced from municipal solid waste from residential or commercial areas. There are many types of clean material recovery facilities. The most common form of clean material recovery facility is the single stream type where every one of the materials are mixed.
Dual-stream material recovery facilities, on the flip side, receive materials that were separated from where they originated from in the mixed container stream including non-ferrous metals and ferrous metals along with a mixed paper stream which includes office paper, newspapers and corrugated cardboard boxes.
Dirty Material Recovery Facilities
A dirty material recovery facility also known as a mixed-waste processing facility is really a plant that handles a mixed solid stream. The main objective of such facilities is to obtain those materials that have been incorrectly thrown out as trash. Once this kind of facility receives recyclables, it sorts them using both manual and mechanical sorting.
After sorting these materials, the facility will process the type of material so they can satisfy the technical specifications essental to the market. The facility sends the remainder stream to your disposal facility just like a landfill. Dirty material recovery facilities have higher recovery rates than clean material recovery facilities. The reason being it sorts 100% of your waste stream.
Additionally it is able to target more materials for recovery than may be sorted at where the recyclable materials originate from. Dirty materials facility materials are often heavier mainly due to the organic materials within the trash. The key trouble with dirty material recovery facilities is the fact that it contaminates recyclables particularly paper. Also, it is costly to function a dirty material recovery facility since it is more labor-intensive.
One of the main things that material recovery facilities take care of is unwanted materials like large objects and plastic bags. Such materials require manual sorting and will make recovering materials a challenging task. Additional problems will be the declining industry for the products that these facilities make as well as the more affordable prices for these products.