New Turnkey MRF Facility for Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council Completed

Specialist recycling engineers Middleton Engineering (UK) has completed a new Materials Recycling Facility (MRF) for Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council designed to support the council’s new kerbside recycling strategy.

The turnkey solution, covers all aspects of design, construction, commissioning and training at the Council’s site in Pentrebach, included a building extension and civil works to house in-floor sections of the sorting system. It also includes external storage silos for incoming collections with push through access to the feed conveyors, an elevated sorting solution, storage bays for sorted materials and a fully automatic ME2R80 Twin Ram baler, for baling multiple waste streams.

The raised sorting system is designed to handle 1000kg of mixed household plastics and metal waste per hour and incorporates a series of bespoke feed conveyors including an in-floor section to facilitate loading, together with variable belt speed control and TV monitoring. Included in the system is an overband magnetic separator, followed by an eddy current separator, to remove ferrous and then non-ferrous metals, together with a bottle perforator.

The sorting solution has been designed to produce high quality recyclate with very low contamination, 1% or less for ferrous and non-ferrous metals, and a minimum requirement of two manual pickers to remove oversize and unwanted materials, prior to the automatic sorting area. Eliminating the need for a picking station and a raised cabin has reduced costs and reduces the risk of operators working at height.

Variable speed controls and interlinks enables the whole system to work together, speeding up or slowing down depending on the density rate of product being processed. Set heights between conveyors, creates a ‘waterfall’ effect ensuring material stays at a manageable single tier level. This prevents cross contamination when product is pulled, or forced, off the belts by the separation devices.

Individual sorted waste streams, including paper and card which arrives at the site pre-sorted and stored in a separate stand-alone bay, is then compacted and baled using the Middleton designed and fabricated Twin Ram baler. This produces uniform, easy to handle and transport baled waste, ready for sale and onward shipping to individual processors. In total the facility is expected to handle in the region of 5,000 tonnes of recyclate per annum.

Paul Davies, Waste Operations Manager at Merthyr Tydfil commented: “With new waste recycling targets across the whole of Wales, our new MRF at Pentrebach is crucial to supporting Merthyr Tydfil’s kerbside recycling strategy and minimising waste to landfill. Middleton Engineering has delivered a cost effective and efficient solution precisely matching our needs with full training and highly responsive ongoing support to fine tune waste processing at the site.”

Mark Smith, Engineering Director at Middleton Engineering said: “We are delighted to be working in partnership with Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council and WRAP on this new MRF project. Taking on board the council’s requirements, we provided a solution that focuses on minimising vehicle movements, to produce an efficient separation and baling system within quite a small footprint. Our solution also centred on incorporating new industry safety standards to provide ease of maintenance and cleaning with good operator interfaces. Part of our design criteria is to provide a broad period of training, both in safety and operation, which included hand holding and refresher training plus ongoing modem assisted offsite telephone help”.