Frequently Asked Questions
Waste minimisation
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. 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.
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.
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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