Report: Secondary sortation would boost plastic recycling

A new study suggests recyclers can recover enough good plastic from a second sortation of curbside material to make it worth their while.

The secondary material recovery facility concept would gather material that's already been sent through initial sortation efforts at primary MRFs and give the material another pass through sortation equipment.

Collecting the back-end material from MRFs on a regional basis would give a secondary MRF the needed volume to pull out enough quality recyclables to support operations, according to the study performed by Titus MRF Services of Danville, Calif., for the American Chemistry Council.

Titus took samples from six MRFs located in the Northeast to serve as a basis for the report's findings.

ACC funded the study as plastics continue to face a low overall plastic recycling rate — one popular estimate from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has it at 9 percent — amid the ever-growing demand for post-consumer resin by brand owners, consumers and packaging makers.

"Secondary material recovery facilities aggregate low-volume and difficult-to-sort materials, along with machine yield losses, from a network of existing primary MRFs. This allows for material to reach the critical mass necessary to justify the types of investments in automated technologies for detailed sorting that may not make sense at the individual MRF level," the report reads.

MRFs are designed to take in material collected at the curbside, which are now commonly mixed into a single stream by residents using one recycling cart. While single-stream recycling has increased participation and boosted recyclable tonnage, the approach does provide additional challenges for recyclers who then have to sort plastics from paper from metal from, sometimes, glass.

Traditional MRFs employ a variety of equipment to do that work, but the nature of the business means that some perfectly good recyclables end up getting missed and sent out the back end in a residual stream to landfills.

Traditional MRFs often have a business model of pushing through high volumes of materials at the expense of fully capturing everything that comes across the conveyor belts. The idea is to give the residual stream more attention at a secondary MRF to further sort out the good stuff.

"The concept of a secondary MRF is less about advanced sorting technologies and more about a business model that can achieve economies of scale for sorting all materials by type within a regional waste-shed, such as the Northeast," the report states. "The equipment and technologies utilized at secondary MRFs are much like those found at modern primary MRFs, but they are employed to refine the recycling stream to recover low-volume and difficult-to-sort materials along with machine yield losses.

"With growing demand for recycled feedstock to meet fast approaching 2025 goals and minimum recycled content legislation, industry needs solutions that will quickly enhance the existing domestic recycling capabilities," the study adds.

"Meeting this growing demand will require investment in several areas, including in primary and secondary sorting. Through aggregation, regional secondary sorting can enhance the capabilities of a network of existing primary MRFs and create the economies of scale for recovering low-volume and difficult-to-sort packaging and products," the study concludes.

The Titus study in the Northeast comes a few years after an initial study in Oregon examined the idea. Titus previously estimated it would cost $16 million to build a secondary MRF to cover Oregon and Washington.

But Jan Dell, who founded The Last Beach Cleanup environmental group and has come out strongly against plastics and plastics recycling, has previously questioned the economic viability of secondary MRFs.

"There is no economic driver for sorting plastics beyond what is sorted in primary MRFs," Dell previously told Plastics News.