Materials Recycling Facility

Working towards zero waste to landfill 

Our Materials Recycling Facilities (MRF) at both our Luton and Wellingborough depots are completely unique to the area. They are mixed ‘dirty’ MRFs, which effectively means that waste does not need to be pre-sorted before going through the system. This is unlike some other ‘clean’ MRFs solely for household and domestic waste, which can only deal with the pre-segregated recyclables from kerbside recycling schemes for example.

The Cawleys MRF is designed to deal with all commercial and industrial waste streams. With our recent £3 million investment into a semi-automated system, we aim to recover at least 60% of all the waste we collect and for the construction industry this could mean as much as 85%. If you are a customer of Cawleys this means that you are already recycling because your waste will be going through our MRF!
 

The diagram above shows what happen inside our MRF. Some of the more common materials that will be recovered from a mixed general waste load include:

• Paper
• Cardboard
• Metals
• Plastic
• Wood
• Inert (soils, bricks etc)

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The process

Once your waste has been tipped into a storage bay, it is slowly fed onto a series of conveyor belts to begin their trip around the facility. Each area in the plant helps to separate one type of recyclable material from another. There are a number of different ways in which this happens:

• Screens/Trommels can help to remove the larger pieces of recyclables.
• Magnetic separation can remove the ferrous metals (cans made of tin)
• Optical separation can separate certain types of plastics such as the different types of plastic bottles that can be collected..
• Air classification can help to separate light and heavy materials (paper for example)

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Recycling and Reprocessing

Once separated, the materials can go on for further recycling. For example the glass we have collected will go on to a re-processor where it be used as low grade aggregate (a material often used in the construction of roads as a substitute for sand) and the cardboard goes onto a UK paper mill to make new cardboard.

Each of the material streams are collected independently at the end of the MRF and can be compacted and baled. This way they can be transported easily and then taken to a reprocessing facility so that they can be turned into shiny new products! 

Once separated, the materials can go on for further recycling. For example the glass we have collected will go on to a re-processor where it be used as low grade aggregate (a material often used in the construction of roads as a substitute for sand) and the cardboard goes onto a UK paper mill to make new cardboard.