Materials Recovery Facility

PERALTA, Jasper Kenneth F.
Projects sustainable initiatives are essential to the preservation of our ecosystem most
especially in the symbiotic living of the people and our flora and fauna. With this, projects such as
Materials Recovery Facility will contribute to this certain cause. Not only these, the government
established laws which created to address the inevitable problem of solid waste.
MATERIALS RECOVERY FACILITY:
To address this waste problem that the country is facing, the Philippine government enacted RA
9003 also known as “Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2000”. This act provides the legal
framework for the systematic, comprehensive and ecological solid waste management program of the
Philippines, which shall ensure protection of public health and the environment. Also stated under this
law is that every barangay in the country must have Materials Recovery Facilities (MRFs) which would
receive, segregate, and dispose garbages to its respective end-user manufacturers leaving only residuals
to be dumped in the sanitary landfills.
Furthermore, Davao City passed an ordinance called “Ecological Solid Waste Management
Ordinance of 2009” under City Ordinance No. 0371-10 which encourages Dabaweños to reduce, reuse,
and recycle. This ordinance also seeks to impose a strict “No segregation, No collection” policy which
urges the citizens to comply the source separation of wastes. [5] With these laws being enforced, it
helped mitigate the problems of waste that the country is facing.
In the light of this increasing garbage problem, one possible method of waste disposal is the
Materials Recovery Facility. A materials recovery facility also known as materials reclamation facility is a
specialized plant that receives, separates and prepares recyclable materials for marketing to end-user
manufacturers. Through MRF, the waste materials in the community will be properly managed thus
preventing the spread of contaminants that may likewise cause danger to human well-being. In line with
the thrust of the government to provide for an ecological waste management program, a materials
recovery facility is of great help to address the need of the barangay with their problem in garbage.
The operations in a materials recovery facility begins with the registration, assessment, and
assignment of segregated waste into the receiving area. Bulky materials are discarded and sent to
recycling facilities, while the rest of the waste is sent on a conveyer belt for semi-automated sorting or
sorting tables for manual sorting. On the other hand, for mixed waste, the materials are separated from
the recyclables and then processed into compost or loaded into trucks for disposal in a sanitary landfill.
The biodegradables that are separated must not be stored within the roofed section of the MRF and
should be transferred to a composting plant immediately. For source segregated waste such as paper,
carton, metals, plastics (polyethylene terephthalate and polypropylene) and glass, they are sorted either
manually or mechanically. The residual materials are stored temporarily and then disposed in a sanitary
landfill. The amount of ingoing and outgoing wastes must be recorded for monitoring purposes and also
for regular validation of the facility mass balance. Material recovery facilities usually operates eight
hours a day, Mondays through Saturdays.
A typical MRF is usually a warehouse-type structure with concrete flooring and enclosed by a
perimeter fence for the purpose of security. A Materials Recovery Facility includes the following
components: tipping or receiving area, sorting or processing area, storage area for recyclables, residuals
storage area, equipment area, space for an office, and loading area for processed recyclables and
residuals. Furthermore, it should also be provided with the basic connections for water and electricity
and adequate space for the entry and exit of waste trucks.
Manually operated MRFs with capacities of less than 2 tpd usually have roofed floor areas of at
least 50 square meters (m 2), which contain only the receiving, processing, and storage areas. Semi-
automated to fully mechanized facilities would require areas ranging from 150 m 2to 1,500 m 2, excluding
parking and buffer zones. The Material Recovery Facility Handbook of the Recycling Marketing
Cooperative of Tennessee (2003) suggests a building area not exceeding 1,400 m 2 for MRFs that process
less than 10 tons of recyclable waste per day and about 1,800 m 2or area for facilities that will handle
waste not exceeding 100 tpd. The basic equipment, even for a manual operation, would include sorting
tables, weighing scales, a baler, and payloader.
Having a Materials Recovery Facility would greatly impact the community through making
biodegradables into compost and fertilizers and recyclables to reusable things thus limiting the garbage
thrown in dumps. There are a lot of recyclable waste that can be converted to a new potentially useful
material. First in the list is the paper. Paper in the form of cardboard, office paper including windowed
envelopes, color paper, file folders and post-it notes. Also included are mail, magazines, mixed paper,
newspaper, paper bags and cups, phone books & paperback books, and shredded paper (in clear plastic
bag). In addition, there are plastics. It can be bottles, food containers and trays, plastic milk jugs and
cups, plastic bags (shopping, newspaper and dry-cleaning bags when bagged together) and household
rigid plastic items such as furniture, and laundry baskets. Furthermore, another recyclable material is
metal. Tin and aluminum cans, aluminum foil & pie tins, ferrous scrap metal and other scrap metals are
some of its example. Lastly are the glasses which includes jars and bottles. These things which come
from our household, establishments, and institutions could be of great help when recovered since it can
be sold to end-market users.

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PERALTA, Jasper Kenneth F.

MATERIALS RECOVERY FACILITY:

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