Materials Recovery Facility

The Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) is where household recyclables are transported to after they have been collected from your kerbside.

Once delivered to the MRF, they are sorted by hand and machinery to identify and separate all the recyclable items. After this process, the recyclable items are baled and transported to reprocessing plants.

The contents of yellow-lidded recycling bins is collected every fortnight by council’s recycling collection contractor. Once the recycling collection truck is full, the truck delivers the material to the MRF. Once at the MRF, the truck passes over the weighbridge to be weighed. The recycling truck then reverses up to the receiving hopper and unloads the recyclables into it.

How it works

Once the recyclables are unloaded into the receiving hopper they feed into the storage hopper which stores up to two days worth of recyclables. The storage hopper has a walking floor that feeds the recyclables onto the first conveyer into the paper trommel.

The paper trommel is a large rotating barrel with large holes in which bottles and containers fall through and move into the next section to be sorted. The paper trommel traps 70 per cent of paper and cardboard (and any large contaminants) which moves directly to the paper sorting line. The paper sorting line is a negative sort, which means sorters remove contaminants from the paper stream by hand and drop them down the large chutes where it is conveyed to a skip out the back. Paper and cardboard drops down to be compacted and automatically wired into a bale weighing more than 800kg.

The other recyclate moves onto the glass fines trommel, which works the same as the paper trommel but has very small holes to remove small pieces of broken glass.

The recyclate then moves onto the bounce table, which bounces rapidly in a tilted position and to allow cylindrical items (cans, bottles etc) to roll off the conveyer and flat items such as newspapers and magazines stay on it. The bounce table is designed to capture the remainder of paper.  Paper is transported to the bounce table and back to the paper sorting line, and the cans and bottles are transported along the conveyer to be hand sorted.

Steel cans and aerosols are lifted from the conveyer by a large magnet and released into the storage cage. Plastics are hand sorted into numbers 1 (soft drink bottles), 2 (2-litre milk bottles) and 3-6 (mixed plastics – ice cream containers, shampoo bottles, takeaway containers etc). Clear, green and brown glass is also hand sorted onto conveyors and into large storage silos. Aluminium cans are separated by a small air current. This sorting line is a positive sort, where workers only have to handle the recyclables, all contaminants go past on a conveyer to a skip.

Each recyclable material type is baled separately, ready for transport to the various recyclate manufacturers for reprocessing.

After the recyclables have been sorted and baled they are transported to reprocessing centres throughout Australia, where they are manufactured into new goods.

Visit the MRF

Council conducts free visits to the MRF for school and community groups. To organise a visit, or for a free copy of the Recycling Education Centre promotional brochure contact council.