There is no shortage of decisions that need to be made early in the process of designing a MRF that will suit your operations in the short and long term. The earlier you get your design/build partner involved with this process and teamed up with your operations team as well as your equipment supplier, the higher the likelihood of avoiding many of the issues.
Material Recovery Facilities (MRF) can be a deceptively simple concept. Once you get past the initial concept of an enclosure for tipping materials to be sorted, running material through a sortation system, and trucking out the sorted products to their final destination, the nuance of how to best perform those tasks begins to present itself. Other questions regarding how the site will function and accommodate future changes will begin to come into focus as well. In our work, we have observed and studied many MRFs across the country. Many of them are great facilities run by skilled operators and we have also seen many that need a re-evaluation of their layout and operations procedures. One constant we observed across the board is that there are typical critical areas of consideration that are often missed or incompletely addressed in many MRFs. These mistakes can be grouped by the area of the operation: the Office and Employee Support Areas, MRF Shop, Process Area, Tipping Hall, Bale Storage, Site Area, and Planning for the Future.
By Jeff Eriks and Evan Williams
