Materials recovery facility

Materials like plastic bags and hoses, which can entangle the recycling equipment, are also removed.

Flattened boxes ride across the disk screen to the other side, while all other materials fall below, where paper is separated from the waste stream with a blower.

The stream of cardboard and paper is overseen by more human workers, who ensure no plastic, metal, or glass is present.

The technical limitations of this involve advanced concepts in mechatronics and computer science, where a robot hand would need to be designed, and a highly flexible algorithm that creates another precise movement algorithm within the time constraints of the system (say, the highly approximate estimate of 30,000 lines of code to do this on a modern processor would trigger too long of a delay to be effective on a sortation line).

MRFs might only collect and recycle a few polymers of plastic, sending the rest to landfills or incinerators.

Material is sorted to specifications, then baled, shredded, crushed, compacted, or otherwise prepared for shipment to market.

A mixed-waste processing system, sometimes referred to as a dirty MRF, accepts a mixed solid waste stream and then proceeds to separate out designated recyclable materials 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.

Today, MWPFs are attracting renewed interest as a way to address low participation rates for source-separated recycling collection systems and prepare fuel products and/or feedstocks for conversion technologies.

MWPFs can give communities the opportunity to recycle at much higher rates than has been demonstrated by curbside or other waste collection systems.

[13] These combine a dirty MRF with water, which acts to densify, separate and clean the output streams.