How can you save £100 per tonne on your Recycling Collections ? - Click here to find out

The best practical and environmental option for recycling of household waste is to separate at source. This ensures that the sorted clean recyclable material can be easily processed and bulked for reprocessing into new products.

To maximise the amount of source separated materials that can be recycled, Grundon working in partnership with local authorities, processes Mixed Recyclables collected from kerbside and bring site schemes at its purpose built Materials Recovery Facilities (MRFs). The materials that are recovered for recycling include:

• Mixed Paper (including newspapers and magazines) manually hand picked and bulk transferred to a paper mill for reprocessing.
• Steel Cans mechanically picked by magnet and bulk transferred to a steel manufacturer.
• Aluminium Cans mechanically picked by eddy current separator and bulk transferred to a reprocessor.
• Mixed Plastics hand picked and sent to a reprocessor for use in making pipes for cabling.
• Cardboard manually hand picked and bulk transferred to a paper mill for reprocessing.

Following the success of its Slough MRF, which opened in 1995, further facilities have been opened at Reading and Slough. The addition of the Leatherhead MRF, brings the company's total capacity to recover recyclables from household and commercial waste to a potential 80,000 tonnes per year.

Grundon also have a Skip MRF at its' site near Oxford. This MRF mechanically sorts different wastes from construction waste/rubble.

Waste Audit

If you need help in assessing your specific requirements we will be happy to undertake a detailed management audit to explore the potential for recovery and recycling of wastes. After the audit is complete, collection and recovery of materials at the MRF is carefully planned to minimise and stabilise your costs. Longer term, options will include the diversion of materials into our planned waste to energy plant.

Process Flow

The waste to be processed is unloaded onto the Tipping Area (1) and grab loaded (2) into the receiving Trommel Feed Conveyor (3).

The rotating, 15 metre long Trommel (4) sorts the materials into three different sizes. The first stream leaving the trommel on the Fines Conveyor (5) transports cans through an Over Band Magnet (6) that removes all steel, through the Fines Picking Conveyor (7) and then to an Eddy Current Separator (8) that removes all the aluminium.

The two remaining streams from the trommel, the Medium Materials Conveyor (9) and the Large Materials Conveyor (10), carry paper, plastics and cardboard to the Picking Station (11). Here, up to twenty pickers work in a room sorting this material.

Below the picking stations are Recovered Materials Bays (12) which feed, via the Recovered Materials Conveyor (13), the sorted paper, cardboard, plastics and metals to the Recovered Materials Baler (14) with a capacity in excess of 15 tonnes per hour. The residue or dross is fed by the Dross Conveyor (15) to a Dross Bunker (16) for disposal elsewhere. The entire MRF operation is overseen via the Control Room (17) in the centre of the MRF plant.

Click on image to enlarge: