Although most of us spend time every day deciding whether we can put an item in the recycling or if it goes in the waste bin, we often don’t consider what actually happens to our recycling once it’s collected. All of the recyclable materials collected across Nottinghamshire will end up at the Veolia Materials Recovery Facility in Mansfield.
This site works with Nottinghamshire County Council to deal with the whole county’s dry recycling and uses a range of machines and checks to sort and separate everything, whilst also picking out any items that cannot be recycled. The facility in Mansfield was built in 2008 and is designed for up to 85,000 tonnes of recyclables each year.
Julie Adams, Veolia regional partnership manager, explained: “If you live in Nottinghamshire and you put your recycling out then it will come here. It all comes through reasonably quickly and goes on to become new plastic bottles, new food and drink cans or new paper and cardboard.”
Whether its plastic bottles, metal tins and cans, paper or cardboard, the site separates these materials so they can be turned into new things. After you put out your recycling bins on collection day, the bins will be emptied by your local council and the recyclables will be brought to the Materials Recovery Facility.
Lorries will empty all of the materials into the tipping hall, where the items will then be loaded onto a conveyor belt. The waste will first go to a pre-sort cabin where large items, such as cardboard boxes, are separated out.
Everything else will go to one of two trommels, each of which weigh over 70 tonnes. These trommels have a large rotating drum inside with different sized holes so that the containers can be separated from the mixed paper.
After this the recyclables then move onto the fine screen, where small items that may have been put into the recycling bin accidentally fall through and larger items pass over the top. These bigger items are then conveyed into the ferrous metal magnet which separates magnetic steel cans and tins through a large magnet over the conveyor belt.
The remaining waste continues through the network to the separator, which uses magnetic forces to lift non-magnetic metals off the conveyor belt, such as aluminium. Then the plastic optic sorter uses an infrared sensor to find plastic items that can be recycled.
All of the items left on the conveyor belt are taken to the container and paper cabins, where members of staff will remove any materials that can’t be recycled. Each of the individual material types is then taken through the bailer, which uses a large ram to form compressed cubes.
These are then loaded onto lorries and taken to reprocessors where they can be recycled and made into new things. The plastic will be turned into new containers, clothing or outdoor furniture, and the tins or cans could become new tins and cans, or even parts for planes or bikes.
Ms Adams offers a “big thank you to all the residents who do separate out their cardboard, paper, food and drink cans, plastic bottles, yoghurt pots and margarine tubs – their efforts make a big difference.”
She continued: “We also have a recycling checker which residents can use and you can put in the name of something and it will tell you if the item can be recycled. People should always use the recycling checker if their they are not sure.”