Not Your Father’s MRF

Eric Oddo, Senior Civil Engineer with the Western Placer Waste Management Authority (WPWMA), a regional agency providing waste disposal and recycling services for the county and several cities, says the MRF (materials recovery facility) owned by the WPWMA must be configured to meet California’s state-mandated recycling goals.

That means everything that comes to the site is processed, with recyclable materials— metal, plastic, many types of paper, glass, wood and yard and land clearing debris—diverted for processing and resale and non-recyclable items sent to the landfill for disposal.

The WPWMA facility began operating in 1995 as a “dirty MRF,” with Nortech Waste LLC of Roseville, Calif., receiving a contract for its design, construction and subsequent operation.

By 2001, with the region growing rapidly and California’s enactment of Assembly Bill 939 mandating diversion of at least 50 percent from landfills, a major expansion was deemed necessary. The project’s goals were to increase diversion by approximately 20 percent and to expand processing capacity from 1,000 tons of trash per day to more than 2,000 tons.

The total price of the project was $26 million, which included engineering, building modifications, retrofitting of existing equipment, and purchase of new equipment. The Authority was able to fund this amount without having to raise rates or issue bonds.

Nortech once again won the RFP and turned to Machinex, an established provider of MRF technology, to handle design and construction of the project’s municipal solid waste recycling facility. Based in Plessisville, Quebec, Canada, Machinex offers full integration of mechanical and optical sorting technologies. 

What set this project apart from the rest was its advanced level of sophistication, says Paul Szura, Nortech’s general manager. It was a highly collaborative effort from the get-go, with Machinex staff using input from Nortech and the WPWMA to design a system that employed new screening technology. Machinex was able to produce a highly flexible design that incorporated features previously found most often only in clean MRFs, according to Oddo. “We all learned a lot,” says Oddo, while Szura remarks that Machinex professionals “went above and beyond” to take the concept from drawing board to reality.