Onyx has suffered difficulties in sorting the materials at the county's materials recycling facilities, including the new 13 million facility at Alton – the UK's largest materials recycling facility. Materials are supposed to be delivered to the plant in a loose form, but instead considerable amounts are arriving in carrier bags.
Councillors at the county's troubled waste partnership, Project Integra, discussed the issue at a meeting earlier this month, with the carrier bag problem “widespread” according to minutes now made publicly available.
The new Alton MRF has been running since 2004 and can process over 85,000 tonnes of material each year. But at the Project Integra meeting, Cllr Jonathan Glen of Hart district council in North East Hampshire said he was “concerned that since Alton MRF came online their recycling rates have gone down”.
Quality
Onyx director of support services, John Collis, explained in reply that the reason for the fall was “a high volume of material previously went to third party MRFs which did not clean material to such a high standard as they were supplying lower grade material to other markets. The recycling rate has gone down because of the quality of the MRF process”.
The Alton MRF is equipped with sophisticated automatic recognition systems for the sorting of materials. This system is used in three separate locations within the facility and works on an optical identification and separation using air jets.
The meeting of Project Integra also heard that Onyx is having to send material already sorted by its Portsmouth MRF to the Alton MRF for secondary sorting. Mr Collis reported that even with the secondary sorting the reject rate “will not get much below 12% unless the input quality changes”.
Mr Collis said that Onyx was processing “for high quality markets” and even with upgrades to the Portsmouth MRF – and more modifications on the way – “everyone needs to address input quality”.
Bags
The biggest problem, councillors were told, was with residents placing items in carrier bags before placing them in their recycling collection containers. The problem has been made worse because in the past, residents have been told to place recyclables in carrier bags before leaving them in recycling boxes, bins or sacks. This was the case in Winchester, which also faces problems because its residents have been told to put side materials in bags.
And, some districts – including New Forest district council (NFDC) – actually have systems that require residents to place recyclables in carrier bags. This was said to be a “challenge to Onyx as well as NFDC”.
Onyx has considered using bag-splitting technology, but bag-splitting machinery tends to “rip up everything to the detriment of material quality”, according to Mr Collis.
Alternate-weekly
The problems could be compounded as more and more households in Hampshire move to alternate-weekly collections, councillors on the Integra Board warned. Cllr Patrick Burridge of East Hampshire district council said that with alternate weekly collections – in which residual waste is collected fortnightly and recyclables on the alternate week – householders often place recyclables in bags.
Cllr Burridge said if districts are moving to alternate week collections, they should “try and persuade people not to put this bag directly into the bin”.
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Collection crews are also to be encouraged to split open any bags they find, councillors resolved. Inputs are being “monitored and loads would be rejected as from 1 April if very badly contaminated”, according to the Integra Board.
The meeting at which the problems with Hampshire's MRFs were raised also saw Hampshire county council threatening to withdraw from the Project Integra partnership. The council believes the partnership's current Board is not the right vehicle to drive it forward (see letsrecycle.com story).
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