| In House Material Recycling Facility – Glasgow’s Recycling Solution After rolling out a co-mingled kerbside recycling service, Glasgow City Council installed a bespoke recycling facility to solve their handling requirements.
Details In March 1998 Glasgow City Council began a green box kerbside recycling service. During the period of operation this service became available to 40,000 households within Glasgow. To further develop this service, a new method of collection utilising blue 140 and 240 litre bins was introduced in April 2003. The blue bins are collected every 4 weeks. The refuse collection remains on a weekly basis and those properties with a brown bin have it collected on a fortnightly basis. This service is now provided to 93,000 households throughout the city. Once collected, the recyclable materials including plastic bottles are transported to the Materials Reclamation Facility at Polmadie. Glasgow City Council opened the largest Scottish local authority materials reclamation facility at Polmadie in 1999. Taking account of advances in recycling technology the facility was further developed throughout 2005. This facility serves the Glasgow city area and is designed to collect up to 25,000 tonnes per annum of recyclable materials. This is based on a single shift. The facility is designed across three floors of a warehouse building. Material delivered to the site is deposited on the top floor of the building and quality inspected. The material is then loaded into hoppers to be transferred to the middle floor. On the middle floor the materials are both manually and mechanically sorted with non recyclable material being removed. Paper is then separated from the other materials.This section of the system has recently been upgraded with the trommel being replaced by a ‘v-screen’ to improve sorting efficiency. The new process removes the paper, cardboard, film, textiles and un-requested materials from the input stream and deposits the remaining steel cans, aluminium cans and plastic bottles onto the original section of the facility. The cans and bottles on the original container line are then sorted by passing through an overband magnet and eddy current unit to remove the steel and aluminium cans. The remaining plastic bottles enter a manual sort cabin where between 4 and 6 operatives segregate the plastic bottles into PET Clear, Natural HDPE and mixed. The HDPE and clear PET bottles are deposited directly into dedicated balers. The PET clear baler has a perforator / flattener in the mouth of the baler to pierce and flatten the bottles prior to baling. The remaining mixed plastic bottles are held in storage cages and baled later. The plastic bottles pass to the ground floor where they are baled and stored prior to transportation to a reprocessor. If an average value of 4% of the total material input is assumed to be plastic bottles, the maximum capacity of plastic bottles through the MRF would be 1,000 tonnes per annum again based on a single shift. The weight of plastic processed is approximately 0.7 tonnes per hour. At this time markets are reported to be good, and there are no problems with limitation of material supply from households. In the future this is thought likely to be influenced by changes in packaging type and consumer purchases. Polmadie MRF have no firm plans to develop the facility but will continue to provide services to ensure that government recycling targets are met. Residual waste will always need to be treated once recyclable material has been extracted so new technologies and MBT will become increasingly important in assisting with this. Further information www.fermanagh.gov.uk |
