A Visit to Ford Materials Recycling Facility

ERA’s visit to the Ford Materials Recycling Facility (MRF) in March provided a fascinating opportunity to extend our understanding of what happens to the contents of our burgundy bins and why the automated system they have in place really does need us to only put the right things into those bins and to make sure they are clean, dry and loose.

The bin lorries that come to our streets to pick up our mixed recyclables take them to a transfer station where they are amassed for maybe a couple of days and are then taken to Ford MRF in a much bigger truck. The facility at Ford then sorts and separates it all, preparing it so it can then be sent to reprocessing plants, for example aluminium will be compressed into cubes called bales.

The sorting and separating is mostly done automatically by a series of large, noisy, dusty machines, each with a separate job to do. Running both by day and night, but not on Sundays, the MRF has the capacity to sort 100 000 tonnes per year, but is not yet functioning at full capacity, currently averaging something like 1500 tonnes per week with an annual total of 76596 recorded for 2020/21.

Firstly, large cardboard is removed by hand together with any obvious non-recyclables and then the conveyor belt delivers the recycling in the trommel, a huge revolving drum, which results in all the glass being smashed and then falling through sets of holes. The smallest pieces get used for aggregate with the larger pieces being sent elsewhere to be reprocessed into new glass items. Bottles and jars can be recycled, pyrex and wine glasses have different melting points and would contaminate the load. As the rest of the material leaves the trommel newspapers and magazines exit on one conveyor belt while the rest moves by another conveyor belt to the ballistic separator which is angled upwards and which shakes everything such that lighter items come out at the top and heavier ones further down. Magnets then suck up the steel items (jam jar lids, cans, aerosols) and an eddy current separator uses a magnetic current to repel aluminium, making it jump to a different conveyor belt.  Next an optical separator sorts the plastic by colour, using jets of air to blow the plastic bottles and containers to their correct destinations. This will leave mixed paper and card still on the conveyor belt, with humans used at this point to double check what is left. Individual recyclable types are then squashed into cubes in the balers for subsequent transfer to appropriate reprocessing plants.

While we were watching all this happening the machine came to a temporary standstill twice and it was explained to us that often this is because of the inclusion of the wrong items in what is being fed into the system. Even something as seemingly innocuous as a plastic carrier bag can get shredded and then wrapped around the machinery, bring it to a full stop until the blockage can be cleared. Soggy paper and card will also gum up the workings. Clean, dry, loose.

Clearly ‘wishcycling’ is never going to work, this behemoth of a machine is not going to think ‘oh my, lots of people think xxx should be being recycled, I better start doing that’.

But there is a lot to be learnt from understanding this complex sorting system a little better. If light items such as envelopes are sorted by weight, then stuffing one large envelope with lots of smaller ones is not going to work, items really do need to be loose. Likewise, putting your clean dry baked bean can inside something like a cereal packet will also defeat the purpose. Clean, dry, loose.

It was also explained to us that aluminium is one of the most sort after materials so it makes sense for us to understand how to present aluminium in our burgundy bins so that the system can process it successfully. My family has reverted to having milk delivered in glass bottles from the milkman (resulting in SO much less plastic in our lives!) and I knew that the milk bottle tops can be recycled. I did not realise that putting them into the bin loose does not work, they are just too small. It is important to save up your milk bottle tops and your aluminium foil (which, incidentally, can be washed and reused several times before being binned) and when you have enough, form them into a ball shape before putting them into your bin. A notable variation to the ‘loose’ rule.

Recycling one drinks can, can save the same amount of energy as having a TV turned on for about 4 hours.

‘Clean’ is important, but things do not need to be spotlessly clean, just reasonably clean. Pizza boxes with soaked in grease would not be clean enough, aluminium foil with some burnt black bits would be fine.

Lids – why are we supposed to put some back on but leave others off? It turns out that the reason is simple. If the lid and the base are made of completely different materials, such as a glass jam jar with a metal lid, then they need to go in separately.  As more and more plastic bottles are having lids made of the same plastic as the bottle it has become sensible to put those lids back onto those plastic bottles and let them go through the system together. Those little lids on their own would be too small to be sorted correctly.

We were reminded of the ‘crumple test’. If you scrunch up a sheet of wrapping paper some will stay scrunched up, others will bounce back into shape. If they bounce back they cannot be recycled in our burgundy bins. Plastic bags which cannot go to the MRF for recycling can be taken back to certain supermarkets but you will need to check if that supermarket takes plastic that bounces back, such as cellophane will.

Plastic flower pots would most likely introduce too much dirt into the system and are the wrong colour for their optical sorting system for plastics. Find a garden centre that will take them back.

Batteries must NEVER be put into either of our bins, burgundy or black. We watched a highly dramatic video of a series of fires caused by batteries that have been damaged by the machinery and then find themselves in the system together with a lot of inflammable material.  Vapes can be equally volatile. Please note, any shop that sells more than a certain amount of batteries has to, by law, take back spent batteries. They do not necessarily make their battery recycling bin obvious to find, but we all need to start asking where they are and using them.

Both metal and glass can be recycled time and time again with no loss of quality; and paper and board can also be recycled with minimal loss of quality.

At the MRF they are sure that they can do a better quality job of sorting recyclables than can be achieved by all of us having multiple recycling bins at our homes for different materials, which seems highly likely having heard of some of the strange items that get delivered to them from our recycling bins! One memorable contamination story that we heard was one whole truck full of recycling having to be rejected because one person had put a tub of creosote into their bin.

We asked about where all their bales and the recycled articles they are made into end up, what percentage stay in the UK and were told that the current figure is 93%, which is a distinct improvement on the 80.6% figure for 2020/2021 which is given on their website.  All the sorted materials are SOLD - if everything that currently could be re-cycled was sent for processing it would generate a further £1.5 million to WSCC! Perhaps lower our rates?

Biffa has a 29 year contract with West Sussex County Council to sort our recycling, with that contract setting a target that by 2025 55% of our rubbish should be recycled. They are currently achieving 53% so hopefully by the end of their contract an even greater percentage than 55% will be being achieved. This would not need more articles of different types to be being recycled, just a greater percentage of what currently CAN be recycled needs to find its way into our burgundy bins and on to the MRF.

The group came away with an understanding that a lot that is very worthwhile is achieved at the MRF but felt that we had all realised something or other that we ourselves were recycling wrongly so there is still a big educational job to be done. Hopefully this article can be one small part of that!