Metro Waste Paper Recovery Inc. has opened a new 80,000 square foot materials recovery facility in the Vancouver, B.C. area. The facility will be capable to accepting material either in multi-stream flows or commingled. The cost of the facility is around $5 million.
The facility, being built in Burnaby, BC, is expected to be operational by the middle of this summer. It will replace Metro Waste’s current smaller facility in Surrey, BC.
"This new facility marks a significant step forward in how we offer recycling services in the Lower Mainland to all sectors, including commercial, industrial, printing and municipal customers," says Al Metauro, CEO of Metro Waste Paper Recovery. "We’ll be able to better meet the new standards set in the industry, offering more sustainable programs and achieving higher yields of recyclable materials. Ultimately, this all leads to reductions in waste management costs for our customers."
It will also allow for increased growth in all sectors, ensuring the ability to continue to support municipal programs, and specifically, municipalities wanting to implement zero waste initiatives.
The facility will have a processing capacity of 200,000 metric tons per year. The facility will feature more updated processing equipment than the company’s current facility in Surrey, which will give the company greater flexibility in material sorting.
"We’ll now be able to offer our customers even more flexibility in how materials are collected, including the co-mingling of recyclables, greatly reducing the amount of pick-ups required to remove recyclables at a site," says Brandon Rogers, Metro Waste’s Operations Manager for the Lower Mainland. "This equates directly to a reduction in our carbon footprint as the service provider."
A new automated optical separation scanner will be installed that will scan and segregate, at 160 feet per square per second, the different types of materials such as tin, aluminum and all grades of plastics. The scanner analyzes each item by classification, recognizing the size, weight and density of the item.
For plastics, the scanner has the capability of identifying the specific type of plastic an item is made from.
Disc screens will also be installed on the fiber line, providing superior efficiency in separating old corrugated cardboard containers from other types of paper fiber, in addition to non-fiber containers and residue.
"This specialized equipment is ideal for the commingled, single stream collection we’ll be implementing, as it will decrease the amount of human labor required for separating the materials. The result is a noticeably substantial increase in consistency and accuracy, producing a much higher grade of the final separated materials," says Rogers.
The opening of this new multi-stream facility will confirm to zero waste supporters that Metro Waste will be ready to meet the goal as Metro Vancouver moves forward with its Zero Waste campaign.