MiniMRF’s developer declares the next-generation mixed material recovery facility ready for prime time

Jun 01, 2010 | 04:28 AM | Paul Schaffer

"Never mind, we'll do it." It's not the most inspiring environmental slogan, but it might be the wave of the future.

Exhorting households to sort their recyclables often fails to convince families to actually do that. Curbside pickup of beverage containers and newspapers, particularly if the materials can't be intermingled, strains the budgets of many local governments. Beverages in aluminum and plastic containers are increasingly slurped and tossed away from home.

That leaves the technology option, which goes something like this Expect such materials to end up in the trash but retrieve them at the transfer station or the landfill intake.

Most MRFs (material recovery facilities) handle only materials collected as recyclables from households and public places. But a few MRFs tackle the actual raw trash. After 18 months of operation, a joint-venture MRF of this sort—involving Novelis Inc. and the whimsically spelled Prfection Engineering LLC—is ready for germination elsewhere, according to Steve Viny, Prfection's principal.

Atlanta-based Novelis is a major aluminum sheet producer that last year recovered about 40 billion aluminum cans, weighing more than 500,000 tonnes, worldwide. But Novelis has been aiming for a better recycling ratio and helped with the Dayton, Ohio, MRF project, called MiniMRF LLC.....