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Hello, my name's Chris. And I'm Emily, welcome to the recycling centre!
The technical name for this place is the Regional Material Recovery Facility.
Or MRF for short. Blue box recyclables come here from your community
and many other municipalities in the area. This is a two stream system, that means
that your recyclables need to arrive here
already sorted into two groups. Paper products for one sorting stream,
and containers for the second. Throughout this tour
you'll see why that makes this one of the most high tech and efficient facilities of it's
kind, in
all of North America. Come on! Let's go check it out!
Just to keep our heads safe, need to wear a helmet.
We also have eye protective gear and ear protective gear as it will be quite
noisy in there.
From this monitoring station
we can see that the recycling process here starts with trucks
entering at the scale house. "Okay, come on in" This is where we track
all the materials entering and leaving. By weight,
type of materials, where it's from from and where it's going.
Notice the recycling track is divided into two compartments
to keep the paper in containers separated when they're collected.
When the trucks arrive here they unload your recyclables onto the tipping floor,
which is also divided to keep the paper and container streams separate.
The facility also has two processing lines
that run through the whole facility. In order to keep the streams separate, the
two lines never meet.
So that means if you mix paper and containers together in your blue box,
well that's a problem for us here because of the extra work and costs it creates.
So here we have a pile of paper.
But lets take a closer look. You can see here that there's more than just paper in this pile
for instance, here's a water bottle. The system is designed to mechanically separate
paper into different grades, such as cardboard
and newsprint. It's not designed to separate things like plastic bottles from
the paper stream so this will have to be removed by hand.
In this case the water bottle is recyclable
but it's just being placed in the wrong place. The more you look the more you see
things that don't belong
there's another water bottle, there's a juice carton
and there's a detergent bottle, and here's an aluminum can. All sorting errors.
And here we have a pile that's sorted perfectly. When you sort it right it really does
make a big difference.
So now we're coming into the container tipping floor.
Here we have a mix of plastic, glass, metals
and cartons.
Here we've got some sorting errors. And here,
we have things that just don't belong in a Blue Box.
Having to sort through all these items that don't belong and putting them into their correct streams
costs a lot extra for us to manage. So here we are in the next phase
the pre-sort room next to the container line. We'll be following the container line throughout the
tour
and later on we'll follow the paper line. This is where all of the initial sorting begins.
So this is where we figure out the things that just don't belong that. When you put the wrong things
in your Blue Box
like a frying pan, for instance, it will get pulled off here,
or if you put recyclables in the wrong stream
the staff here will put them in the right stream. The other big job is to rip
open the plastic bags and pull the recyclables
only the bags before they continue through the process. From here
the items in the container line go through a series of machines that
will separate the different material type. The first material to get sorted
is this steel containers.
That's done by the big rotating belt magnet. Here's how that works:
The belt is magnetized and as all of the containers travel under
a powerful magnet the steel containers get pulled up
and stick to the rotating belt as it goes around. Everything else carries on
past the magnet.
Now, when the steel containers reach this point, the belt is demagnetized
and the steel cans drop down this shoot onto a conveyor
that transfers them over to the steel storage bunker.
Once the bunker is full, the steel will be fed
into a bailer then shipped
in transport trucks to a steel manufacture.
Next is the air classifier
its sorts materials by weight. The heavy stuff,
like glass, drops down, and the lightweight stuff like plastics
aluminum cans, foil and milk cartons, and juice boxes
are blown up by an airstream. The lightweight materials travel through the
perforator
and are punctured and flattened. This makes storage more efficient
and it also makes sorting easier, because of the flattened materials,
won't roll around on the conveyors.
Here, the lightweight materials head to the optical sorter.
This is the optical sorter.
We program it to identify different types of plastics based on the chemical composition.
It's called the optical sorter, because the infrared light
sees and identified each item as it travels under the light. They really have some
awesome technology here.
The eye sends an electronic signal to turn on
an air jet which will blow the item in a desired direction.
If it sees a number one plastic, a pop bottle for example,
it will turn an air jet that blows at up. If it sees
items made of number three or number seven plastics
like a shampoo bottle or a yogurt tub, it'll turn on a different air jet
that will blow the item down. The third direction,
or the default, is for everything else. No air jet turned on
and items move forward and down, by force of momentum
and gravity into the middle direction to be sorted later down the line.
Notice how fast the conveyor belt is moving!
That's crazy that they can do all this going so fast.
So here we are in the container sort room, where we sort things like number two
plastics.
Like detergent bottles, any polycoat containers, such as
juice boxes and milk cartons. The reason these are called polycoat containers
is because they consist of several different layers of materials
such as paper and plastic, and in the case of some
juice boxes, a layer of aluminum on the inside. These items are all sorted by hand, as
well the staff sorts out any item that may have been missed by another machine.
If you look over there, there's a container steel cans.
The last thing to be sorted from the container line are aluminum
cans, and this is done by the aluminum separator, which we also call the eddy
current. The eddy current induces an electric current
in the aluminum cans and as they pass through a magnetic field
they are repelled in one direction while the remaining
non aluminum items move in a different direction. Who would have known all these
high-tech machines were in a recycling plant.
That if for the container line, now we'll move on to the paper line,
which has fewer steps, making it easier to follow. Here we are, back in the
pre-sort room.
Where staff are starting to sort through the paper line. The first thing that they do is they remove
all non-paper recyclables, and transfer them into the container line
Here, plastic bags are ripped open and emptied onto the paper line.
And then non-recyclables are put onto the residual line.
which will go to the landfill. We'll come back that later. The paper is then
separated through a screening process.
We have two large paper screens at this facility.
The first one separates cardboard, and the second one
separates box board and newsprint. As the paper moves over the screens,
the large pieces of paper float along the top, and the smaller
lighter weight pieces drop down through the screens. See how the cardboard floats along
the top of the screens?
After being screened the paper goes into the paper sort room
where the final sorting is done manually.
Here is where the cardboard
receives a final hand sort, to insure that it's a top grade product.
Remember, when recycling cardboard
make sure to remove all non-cardboard material.
For instance, with a tray like this, make sure to remove the plastic wrap.
This simple step really helps us out.
Our goal is to produce a top quality end product. And to do that, we need to produce
bails full of recyclables, free of things that don't belong. The cardboard is fed into
the bailer.
Paper is either bailed, or compacted into transport trailers.
The bailer compacts and bundles
with strong steel wires to be shipped off to the mills in Ontario, and beyond.
In fact, most of the materials stay pretty close to home in Ontario.
Here is where all the bails of different product types
are stored, waiting to be shipped. The materials that we produce here are
really top quality.
And you at home start the process when you take the time to sort it right.
It really makes a difference, so thank you. Here's a transport trailer
filled with newsprint,
ready to be shipped off to one at the paper mills in Ontario. Our last stop is
the residual Iine.
This is the last chance to capture any recyclable that may have been missed throughout the sorting
process.
We're proud of how much we recycle here. 99% Of all recyclables
that come into the facility are captured.
That's the highest capture rate in all of Ontario, and quite possibly North America.
Less than 3% of materials they come into this facility are sent to
landfill.
That includes things that just don't belong, like
old toasters, or even diapers.
Now we're not just here to show you this new recycling facility, we're trying to show you that
if you just take a little time
to properly recycle, we can all benefit, and can help clean up our environment.
See ya next time!