Materials recovery facilities

The Cost to Reycle at a Materials Recovery Facility National SoHd Wastes Management Association, Washington, D.C., 1992. 

PET has the second highest scrap value for recycled materials, second only to that of aluminum.1 A typical PET beverage bottle consists of PET (60 g), polyethylene (1 g), and label and glue (5 g). Therefore, the PET bottle scrap must be separated before the PET can be recycled. The bottles are sorted at a material recovery facility and compressed. The compressed PET bottles are then washed and converted to flake by grinding. The flakes may be converted to pellets in an extruder. The pellets are more suitable for material handling. Currently recycled PET is being used to make food and nonfood containers, straps, sheeting, and... 

Eddy-current separation is usually applied to the removal of nonferrous metallics from product streams containing nonmetallic or nonmagnetic materials. These include applications such as material recovery facilities (MRF), eg, aluminum can recovery from commingled containers both prebumed... 

Energy and material recovery facilities, for instance, are similar to other capital intensive manufacturing operations in that they cannot operate economically unless they receive regularly sufficient feedstocks to utilize production capacity. A guaranteed supply of waste is the foundation upon which an economically feasible energy recovery project is built. However, municipalities frequently control only a fraction of the wastes collected within their jurisdictions. 

Special collection systems are generally provided for large-scale or commercial postconsumer applications such as for agricultural films, chemical containers, automotive parts, carpets, and polystyrene foam packaging. Since most of the plastic is collected as multimaterial or in commingled forms, the collected plastic waste has to be sorted, separated, and cleaned, and most of this is done at material recovery facilities (MRFs). 

Currently, material recovery facilities operate using one of four categories of recycling processes which are summarized in Table 1 Primary and sec-... 

MRF material recovery facility MVX mixing venting extruder... 

Typically, material collected by one of the methods in Table 3.1 is transported by truck to a material recovery facility (MRF), where a second sorting eliminates major contaminants, mixed grades and colours of plastics and unrecyclable material. Thereafter, recyclables are baled and transported to a reprocessor where they are granulated, washed, further separated and repelletised before transport to the end-user. 

Pytlar, T., Trends in Materials Recovery Facility Modernization, Resource Recycling, Oct. 2004, pp. 15-21. 

There have been pilot RTC lm collection programs with poor results due to extensive (uneconomical) sorting necessary at a materials recovery facility (MRF) to prepare material for market and due to food contamination. One such program, conducted in the Portland metropolitan area in 1990, had high amounts of food and residue contamination which resulted in the landfilling of large amounts of film and containers. 

In the best of times, recycled PET can bring the reclaimer an average profit of 8 cents per pound. Recycled polyolefins typically bring the reclaimer an average profit margin of 4 cents per pound (1). Many other manufacturers have formed partnerships or ventures with materials-recovery facilities (1,30,31). 

If the material is not intercepted at the transfer station, the last point of capture is the landfill itself. If Materials Recovery Facilities (MRFs) are being used, then this is possible, but this channel suffers from the same problems as transfer stations with regards to contamination. 

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