The 2 million plant will process about 25,000 tonnes of material from the city's new blue bin paper recycling kerbside collections which were phased in from April to December 2003.
Opening the plant on Friday, Onyx chief executive Cyrille du Peloux, said: “We know that we have to reach recycling targets of 10% by March this year and 18% by 2005/6 in Sheffield, but with the success of our blue bin collections we are confident we will reach them and surpass them. We have now collected 9,500 tonnes of paper and are within a couple of weeks of reaching the 10,000 tonnes mark.
 Onyx CEO Cyrille du Peloux and leader of Sheffield council Jan Wilson open the new MRF |
“The success of the blue bins demonstrates that the residents of Sheffield are clearly enthusiastic about recycling and care about the environment,” he added.
About 190,000 households of the 200,000 in Sheffield have access to the kerbside collections, and participation rates are thought to be about 60 to 65% among those householders. The record for a single day's collection has so far been 94 tonnes on January 3, 2004. Onyx Sheffield believes that the blue bin collections have increased the city's recycling rate from 4% in 2001 to a current rate of 11% of the city's 240,000 tonnes of municipal waste.
Previously, unsorted paper from the collections had gone through Severnside Recycling, but the new MRF means paper and cardboard can be sorted before going direct to the paper mills for reprocessing – at Shotton and, to a lesser extent, nearby Sonoco.
Equipment
Equipment for the facility has been provided by OKLM Recycling Technology Ltd, sorting paper from cardboard and contaminants in a three stage process. Firstly, there are automatic screens to filter out larger cardboard pieces and fine pieces. Then an optical sorter detects any remaining pieces of cardboard by colour and uses a jet of air to sort them from the paper stream. Finally, four of the plant's staff of nine sort the material manually before it is ready for reprocessing.
”We are delighted at the quality awareness of the public.“
– Martin Simpson, Onyx Sheffield MD
Contamination in the paper, removed by the MRF, is mainly plastics and textiles – and this is recycled by Onyx Sheffield's community sector partners. At the end of the process, the paper has a contamination level as low as 1.5%.
But much of this quality comes not because of the efficiency of the MRF machinery, but because of a high awareness among Sheffield residents of what they should be putting in their bins, said Martin Simpson, Onyx Sheffield managing director. Thousands of residents have now signed up to be 'Recycling Champions' – committing themselves to encouraging others to recycle in the city.
Mr Simpson told letsrecycle.com: “The public have been brilliant – there have been over 3,000 who've signed up to be Recycling Champions. We are delighted at the quality awareness of the public. We have to remind them not to put their paper into plastic bags before putting them in the bins, but not very often.”
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