What we do with your recycling
The Waste Recovery Facility at Farington is home to a Material Reclamation Facility or MRF which is able to process the recyclables from all over the county.
The recyclable materials which are collected from your doorstep by your local waste collection authority are delivered to the MRF where they are sorted . Using a range of technologies the MRF is able to separate the plastic bottles, cans and glass that are delivered together from households. Once the recyclables are separated they can be sold to manufacturers to make new products.
Separated materials are more valuable, and can be sold for a better price, meaning that Lancashire as a whole benefits from the income that is generated.
People love to recycle, and because of this sometimes items are put into the recycling that perhaps shouldn't be there. For example, although saucepans are made of metal, they cause problems in the MRF blocking the machinery. This means that the MRF has to use people to hand pick these items out.
A magnetic belt separates ferrous metals such as steel tins and cans, and an eddy current separator to remove non-ferrous metals such as aluminium cans.
Any glass in the recycling is broken and passed over vibrating screens. The pieces of broken glass fall through the screens onto conveyor belts which take the glass cullet (the term used for the broken glass) to hoppers to await collection.
Plastic bottles come in two grades of plastic, both of which are widely used in the recycling industry. These are HDPE and PET. Plastic bottles are punctured and flattened and then sent for optical sorting. This is done using five machines, each set to recognise different wavelengths of light. At the end of the sorting all the plastics have been separated into their different types.
Paper and card are delivered to the MRF from your home, and are baled for market without any further separation.
With the obvious exception of glass, all the sorted recycling streams are baled and stored to await collection by the merchant who will recycle it into something new. For example, your plastic bottles could become fleece jackets and your tin cans could become washing machine drums.