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Your recycling is picked up and taken to Grundons Materials Recycling Facility (MRF) in Leatherhead.
The rubbish first passes through a large rotating drum, about 10 metres in diameter. This drum 'fluffs' up and separates the rubbish into different sizes. The small bits of rubbish fall through holes at the beginning of the drum, larger pieces move down the drum and fall through larger holes, and the big pieces, like cardboard boxes, are taken off the end.
This is how the rubbish gets separated onto different conveyor belts, for different sized items.
Rubbish on the small conveyor belt is hand sorted and pickers select any plastic bottles from the passing waste. They drop them through tubes that stand beside them, which lead to large storage bunkers. These are emptied when full and the plastic is compacted down into bales.
The rest of the rubbish continues to pass by the pickers and into a metal separator, where the steel cans are removed by magnets and the aluminium cans are pinged off by electromagnetic currents. The aluminium and steel are then compacted and baled. The rest of the waste moves on to be disposed of elsewhere.
The larger items pass through a room with up to twenty hand sorters. They remove the plastic bottles as before. Paper and cardboard then move along to the compactor to be baled.
Manufacturers then buy these compacted bales to produce new products.
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Paper
Baled paper is made into pulp. Contaminants, like staples, are removed and the fibres are cleaned. The pulp is then made into new paper products at Aylesford Newsprint
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Aluminium cans
The cans are shredded and fed into a magnetic separator to remove any bits of steel, like ring pulls. The metal is then blasted with hot air (to remove the lacquer which covers the surface) and melted down. The molten metal is turned into new drink cans.
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Steel
Steel is melted down in large furnaces and poured into moulds to make new drink cans.
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Plastic
Plastics are reformed into moulding granules that are washed and dried. This is then mixed with additives and/or more virgin raw material, extruded and chopped into pellets ready to be turned into new plastic products.
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Glass
The glass goes to Day Aggregates where it is crushed into ecosand. It is then used as secondary aggregate in the construction industry, perhaps for paving.
What happens to the |recycling collected from the recycling banks?
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