Page 77 - Solid Waste Analysis and Minimization a Systems Approach

FUNDAMENTALS OF RECYCLING PROCESSES 55

Clean MRF
Ferrous & bi-metal cans
Aluminum cans
HDPE plastics
Commingled Magnetic Vibrating Eddy current Manual sorting PET plastics
containers separator screen separator station #1
Mixed glass
Recyclable MSW
Residue
OCC
Mixed paper Manual sorting
products station #2 Newsprint
Magazines
Residue
Baler and/or trailer
for shipment

Landfill or waste
Nonrecyclable combustion
MSW
Figure 2.15 Clean MRF overview.

delivered in the form of a mixed food and beverage container stream (typically
glass, ferrous metal, aluminum and other nonferrous metals, PET [No.1] and HDPE
[No.2] plastics) and a mixed paper stream. A dirty MRF (Fig. 2.15) accepts a mixed
solid waste stream and then proceeds to separate out designated recyclable materi-
als 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.
3 Consolidators and depots—A consolidator or depot is similar to a MRF, but it does
not perform any sorting operations. These entities hold or store materials until a
specified batch size is reached or when a recycling processing facility is ready to
process the material.
4 Material brokers—Material brokers buy recyclable materials from cities, busi-
nesses, depots, or MRFs and sell the materials to a processing facility.
5 Processing facilities—These facilities perform the actual processes to recycle
materials. Many different processing facilities exist for different materials, such as
metals, glass, and papers.

2.8.3 ALUMINUM RECYCLING
Aluminum recycling can be broken down into three steps:

1 Sorting
2 Baling
3 Compressing