Cory Environmental is one of the UK’s leading recycling and waste management companies, employing over 1,000 people at more than 30 sites. The company provides a wide range of integrated services, from street cleansing and municipal waste collection to recycling, transfer and disposal, and has been recognized with a number of awards for sustainable transport, the management of facilities and city cleanliness.
In 2002, Cory was awarded a 30-year contract with the Western Riverside Waste Authority (one of four statutory waste disposal authorities in London) to handle over 500,000 tonnes a year of municipal waste. The WRWA area incorporates the Boroughs of Hammersmith and Fulham, Lambeth, Wandsworth and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Recently, Cory Environmental chose Quebec-based Machinex Industries Inc. to handle the design and construction of what the company is calling one of the most automated MRFs in the world.
The new Western Riverside Materials Recycling Facility at Smugglers Way in Wandsworth, London, was officially opened by Her Royal Highness, The Princess Royal (Anne), on Thursday 10th March, 2011. According to Cory, the facility will now play a crucial part in the integrated waste management solution that the company has developed for the WRWA. The £25 million MRF will process over 84,000 tonnes of dry recyclables per year from the WRWA area.
“The opening of the MRF is an important step for Cory’s operations in London,” said Peter Gerstrom, Chief Executive of Cory Environmental. “The MRF will have a very significant impact on our abilities to recycle great volumes of waste going forward. This official opening marks the culmination of a long process and I would like to thank everybody involved for their hard work on the project.”
According to Pierre Paré, president of Machinex, the plant is very significant to the company. “It was a challenge because of the [relatively small] size of the building and because we partly use gravity on the four levels for the process,” he said.
Besides the very vertical nature of this particular system, which includes a three-level screen, another important challenge of this project for Machinex was the requirement for complete automation of the system, which is single-stream (all recyclable materials including newsprint, cardboard, containers and other recyclable items are collected in one container.)
The facility contains 14 Pellenc optical sorting machines, over 100 fast moving conveyor belts and an array of hi-tech devices, including sorters and magnets that allow the recyclables to be separated into a range of commodities. One other notable aspect of this system, according to Machinex, is that material is fed into the sorting system via a crane and grapple unit, which is unique for an MRF.
Additionally, a SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) was installed at Western Riverside to supervise all the operations from the control room. Thus, the Chief Operator has access to all reports pertaining to production, as well as the status of the system and machinery. According to Machinex, the SCADA system can easily detect anomalies in production, which has the benefit of increasing productivity and thereby, the profitability of operations.
“We have a number of sorting projects in America and are very pleased to have developed this facility,” said Paré.
