iQRenew and its partners Materials Recycling Facilities (MRF’s) receive co-mingled materials and cardboard.
By investing in these MRF’s, iQRenew will enhance their capability to secondary sort and prepare waste streams for markets.
What goes on at a MRF?
Sorting Steps at a Material Recovery Facility (MRF)
1. Pre-Sort:
MRF staff manually remove contamination (e.g. plastic bags)
2. Star Screen Sorting:
A series of shafts fitted with rotating star shaped discs propel paper and cardboard forward, while bottles, cans and containers fall backward.
3. Glass:
Sent for further sorting by colour or to glass crusher.
4. Magnets:
Rotating magnets pick up steel cans.
5. Eddy Currents:
An electromagnetic field repels aluminium cans away from other products.
6. Optical Sorting:
Infrared sensors and air jets sort plastic types 1 and 2 (PET and HDPE respectively).
7. Manual Sorting:
MRF staff manually sort the other plastic types (3 to 7).
Paper
Export markets for waste paper are increasingly restrictive. As part of its ban on foreign waste, China has tightened mixed paper standards that used to allow up to 5% contamination to now only allowing 0.5%. Subsequently, mixed paper that is sent for recycling is unfortunately being landfilled around the world.
The solution to avoiding recyclable paper ending up in landfill is to invest in optical sorting equipment at MRFs and create a very high grade mixed paper.
iQRenew will add additional paper optical sorting equipment to a number of its MRFs to sort paper and cardboard into high grade feedstock for international and domestic manufacturers.
