Prince George’s County, Maryland, officials celebrated the modernizing of one of their recycling facilities Wednesday afternoon.
The upgrades allow the county to produce higher quality materials for recycling and even make more money off the materials because they are less contaminated.
Recycling trucks are weighed before they back in tons of recycled materials into the Prince George’s County Materials Recycling Facility, or MRF. This is a non-stop process throughout the day.
鈥淥n a daily basis, we take in 250 tons per day,鈥� said Michael Bell, senior operations manager at the facility. 鈥淲e take in over 60,000 tons per year, and we process over 555 to 58,000 tons per year.鈥�
The new upgrade to the MRF are no-wrap fiber screens. They look similar to ninja stars that are constantly spinning. They are spaced out every few inches and allow fiber materials like paper and cardboard to float over, while plastic and other materials fall between the rods.
The original fiber screens would often get damaged by items such as plastic grocery bags winding around the rods.
Bell said the new upgrades fix that problem.
鈥淲ith this upgrade, these screens have allowed us to drop our downtime by 8% as well as we’ve seen the contamination levels across all our bales drop by 5%,鈥� Bell said.
All the materials are then packaged together in bales. When the bales are less contaminated by other materials, Bell said it allows them to make more money selling these recycled materials to companies that reuse them.
There are other benefits to less contamination.
鈥淟ess contamination in recycling is a big deal. Contamination leads to rodents (and it also) makes this job a lot harder for the equipment and the sorters that work on the line,鈥� Bell added.
These new fiber processing lines are just one of the many ways the MRF sifts through the recycling from 180,000 households.
There are also optical laser scanners and magnetic belt. These technological advances have led Prince George鈥檚 County to have one of the most successful recycling programs in the state.
Samuel Moki, the director of the Department of Environment for Prince George’s County, told 杏吧原创: 鈥淔or us to install these fiber sorters, that is even going to help us recycle better. It’s even going to make our recyclable materials that we sell out in the in the market of much higher quality and much better revenue for the county, I think it’s a wonderful thing.鈥�
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