Frequently Asked Questions
Kerbside collection (waste)
Plastic film such as supermarket carrier bags and LDPE sacks from commingled collection rounds are removed at the front end of the process. The Crayford facility utilises bag splitters, that have a rotating ripping drum that splits the bags and empties the contents. The film is then removed manually from the remainder of the recyclable stream.
No cleaning is completed at Crayford of the recyclable commodities. Crayford is the first stage of the reprocessing process, sorting the recyclable materials into individual grades. Materials are then baled and sent to dedicated reprocessors per material stream. These reprocessing facilities will often employ washing and drying facilities into their processes to de-label and remove contamination of products.
Those items cannot be accepted at present. As pointed out these comprise of metal and plastic that cannot easily be separated at a materials recycling facility at present. Viridor is constantly looking to expand the list of recyclable materials that can be accepted at its facilities so as technology develops, those and other type of materials may be accepted for recycling.
Charnwood Borough Council undertook a competitive tender process to find out the most efficient and cost-effective solution for the processing of recyclables collected across the borough. After the council’s comprehensive assessment, Viridor's tender successfully met the council’s criteria and proved to be the preferred option.
The Crayford MRF facility is located in close proximity to a number of its reprocessing partners, so although the front end movement of material from Charnwood to Crayford may be seen as a long journey, the movement from Crayford to the next stage of reprocessing is in many cases reduced. An example of this is that Viridor trades with Aylesford Newsprint Ltd, a large recyclable newsprint mill in Kent, which is only approximately 20 miles from the Crayford facility.
Crayford materials recycling facility utilises optical sortation equipment that uses NIR (Nir-Infra Red technology) to sort plastic by polymer type, which are then ejected from the mixed plastic stream. These are typically sorted into HDPE and PET bottle fractions. The remaining mixed plastic fractions are then sent for onward recycling and reprocessing. Dedicated plastic reprocessing facilities will have further optical sortation equipment to achieve full polymer sort of all plastic grades, this equipment can sort down to particles of only a few millimetres in diameter.
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