Household recycling and the NAWMA Material Recovery Facility MRF

NAWMA’s Material Recovery Facility (MRF) was opened in 2017 and is a credit to the NAWMA Technical Working Group, Board and Constituent Councils. It is one of only two large-scale MRFs operating in South Australia and the only one owned and operated by local government. It has been designed to future-proof NAWMA, and more broadly South Australia, and has doubled South Australia’s recyclables processing capacity.
Housed inside a large purpose-modified industrial building of some 3,800sqm, the MRF is a combination of trommels, magnets, eddy-currents, ballistic separators and manual picking stations fed by over half a kilometre of conveyor belts. The recycling operations aid in the production of high quality secondary raw materials (finished goods) such as paper, plastics, glass, aluminium and steel, which are predominantly marketed locally in Australia as well as internationally.