SORTING METALS AND PLASTICS
Trommels
Trommels weighing around 20 tonnes filter materials into different size fractions at the beginning of the recycling process © Alex Marshall, Clarke Energy Ltd/Wikimedia Commons
Thanks to the electromagnetic properties of metals, it has always been relatively straightforward to separate these materials. So this part of the process has always been heavily automated. Typically, mixed recyclate first passes over a rubber conveyor belt, where magnets remove magnetic ferrous metals such as steel cans. Additional metal sorting units, eddy current separators, then induce electromagnetic currents in the remaining metal waste to separate it from plastic, glass and paper.
Once metals are out of the way,the MRF is left with plastics,paper and glass. Following the Landfill Directive, manufacturers of recycling equipment developed machinery that could separate each material based on its physical properties. Simple airjets sort light materials from denser items, blasting the former into collectors with heavier waste remaining on the conveyor belt. But the similar densities of paper and plastic limited the effectiveness of these early methods.
Towards the end of the millennium, new systems were developed to sort based on shape, in particular allowing plastic bottles to roll off the conveyer for separate collection. However, plastic film, boxes and tubs would stay on the conveyor alongside paper, contaminating, and devaluing, the recovered material. Today, separators use variable air flow and multi-stage screening to sort dense materials more effectively from lighter wastes.
An eddy current separator
An eddy current separator’s key component is the magnetic rotor. This has a series of permanent rare earth magnets mounted on a support plate attached to a shaft. The magnetic rotor is surrounded by, but not attached to, a wear shell which supports the conveyor belt. This allows the rotor to spin independently and at much higher speed than the wear shell and belt. When a piece of nonferrous metal, such as aluminium, passes over the separator, the magnets inside the rotor rotate past the aluminium at high speed. This forms eddy currents in the metal, which in turn create a magnetic field around the aluminium. The polarity of that magnetic field is the same as the rotating magnet, causing the metal to be repelled away from the magnet. This repulsion changes the trajectory of the aluminium from that of non-metallic materials, allowing the two material streams to be separated
While these modern separators can separate plastic away from paper, many local authorities still use older equipment, waiting for a full return on existing investments before buying the latest equipment.
Today, the household waste collected in bins produces over 20 different types of plastic, not all of them easily recyclable. Some plastics cannot be mixed with others because they have chemically different polymers, while others are produced in very low volume and are simply too expensive to separate with current technology. Packaging accounts for 36% of the UK’s consumption of plastics. So designing packaging with the limitations of separation technology in mind is one way of reducing the amount of non-recyclable plastic waste. With this goal in mind, the government’s Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) has produced guidelines and best practice case studies for UK manufacturers, with tools to test whether the plastics, dyes and adhesives used in packaging can be successfully recycled.
Most MRFs will segregate two key types of plastic: polyethylene terephthalate (PET), used in soft drinks and water bottles, and high-density polyethylene (HDPE), a more rigid polymer used to make food trays, bottle tops and milk bottles. After these are removed, additional plastics may be sorted, via optical sorting, such as medium density and low-density polyethylene – see Infrared sorting.
The ability to take recovered material and to turn it into something useful is an important part of the recycling chain. Currently, much of the plastic recovered in the UK is exported for further processing. China is a major consumer of used polymers. There is, however, growing capacity to process recovered polymers in the UK. For example, the Closed Loop Recycling plant in Dagenham, Essex, was one of the first in the UK to recycle PET and HDPE from plastic bottles into food-grade material. The plant can process up to 35,000 tonnes of bottles each year. Food containers and drinks bottles are cleaned, melted and reconstituted into plastic flakes before they can be made into food containers once more. As well as processing local council waste, closed loop recycling also buys in bales of sorted plastics to make pellets of different grades of polymers which it sells on to make new bottles or other food packaging– see Closed loop economy.