Murph's first MRF

After getting up early and arriving on time for a tour first-thing this morning, I wandered aimlessly around the Hamilton Organics/Waste/Material Recovery Facility site for half an hour. It wasn't on purpose- I got lost due to the unclear office locations in a conglomeration of buildings off Burlington Street in Hamilton. What surprised me was that as a girl wandering around not wearing a high-visibility vest nor a hard hat just wandering around avoiding the front end loaders, I was never confronted. Nobody came to my rescue to tell me where to go, or even to tell me I wasn't authorized to be there! Once I found the right office I was fitted out with all the necessary gear and taken on a tour of the MRF. After the tour I had a good long chat with the operations manager at the facility and got some great information and insight into the design of MRFs.
This MRF was constructed within the old Firestone plant on Tire Street, and lacks the efficiency of its peers housed in pre-engineered warehouses. They have, however, made it work. The building has some obvious shortcomings, but there are also some great moments in the plant where the clerestory windows provides great daylighting to line sorters. When the Firestone plant was built (starting in 1921 and added onto at regular intervals to 1983), lighting the entire 822,191 sqft of plant was evidently a costly undertaking. (City of Hamilton Public Works Department: Energy, Fleet and Facilities Division Report PW09063) Clerestory windows appear in several of the buildings on the site, allowing plenty of daylight to enter into the bays of the facility. Despite being dirty and poorly insulated, these windows do make a difference in the ambient lighting levels of the plant, as seen in the photos.

The loader scoops bucketfuls of the mixed recyclables into a bin which feeds a rotating screen drum (to the left) which sifts out all the glass and sends it on a backward conveyor belt to the sectioned off area behind the concrete blocks. All else moves forward up a conveyor belt to be sorted.

Up the conveyor is a line of sorters who are each designated to pull different things off the line, including garbage, PET, LDPE and HDPE.

This is the super amazing plastic bag sucking machine! It's constantly vacuuming so that the ladies can "hand" the plastic bags upwards and it feeds them into a separate bin.

Just to the right is the magnet which pulls off all the steel and ferrous materials and throws them in a bin below. Next some other machine (it had a complex name!) shoots the aluminum down to the guy in orange below. He has to pick out all the non-aluminum stuff, and allow the aluminum to go on up the conveyor to the bin

This is the mountain of unsorted blue bin items that have been dumped off trucks

Steel bin

This is the optical plastic sorter. It works by shooting air from compressors at the plastic bits while they are being flung in the air off the conveyor. It somehow can sort and direct tetra packs, HPDA, LDPE, and PET at lightning speed!

There's that bin for Tetra packs and milk cartons

If compactors made scat, this would be it. The plastics have been compressed and baled as they come out of the compactor in a nice rectangular prism.

Baled steel

Baled Polystyrene (Styrofoam)- apparently it takes HUGE quantities of the stuff to make one of these bales because it has so much air in it! These are so dense it's unthinkable!

On the other side of the plant is the paper products dumping pile!

The paper products head up a conveyor which has large cogs in it to allow large corrugated cardboard pieces to "float" to the top, while the smaller paper products will drop to a conveyor belt below to be sent to a sorting line. Evidently, these rotating pieces can get really entangled in any plastic sheet contaminating the paper stream.

The paper sorting line enjoys the best daylighting in the house. Not a bad way to work!

Unfortunately not everyone follows the rules of recycling. and everything that got into the paper stream which shouldn't be there gets tossed into this bin. Despite having a plastics recovery facility in the next room, all this will be compacted and baled and sent to landfill because it is just too messy to deal with. SO SORT IT RIGHT!

A cardboard load arrived from the transfer station while I was visiting!

The entire paper section of the plant- not too bad for natural light and open space!

The compacted paper products are baled and wrapped with steel cable fed from these spools into the baler. I just liked the way the light was filtering in on them.

The trucks just open their gates and tip away anywhere on the floor. To get the last little bit out, they raise up the box and drop it down quickly, like you would shake a bottle to get the last bit out. The loaders come along shortly thereafter to push the recyclables into the mountain. The highest bay in the whole facility was converted into this truck dump station because it had to allow for the trucks to tip up and not hit the ceiling! Watch your head!

Action shot of that dump!

Paper products mountain, and a clerestory window

The recyclables have to get from the floor up to the top of the compactor, so they go on up this nifty conveyor with steps in it

Baled paper products with the cardboard conveyor in the background