The new material recovery facility under construction at the Coastal Park landfill site
Cape Town’s new material recovery facility (MRF) at the Coastal Park landfill site should start operations in November next year.
The R186-million MRF is designed to receive co-mingled clean and dry recyclables, with the materials separated so they can be sold and used in the manufacturing of new products.
The MRF will create a minimum of 100 jobs.
It is expected that the facility will have the capacity for sorting 65 t of recycled material a day.
This will allow the City of Cape Town to extend its separation-at-source recycling collection programme significantly, as the expansion of recycling services is currently constrained by a lack of sorting capacity.
The MRF building will house mechanical separation equipment, including a bag splitter, a magnetic separator, screens, conveyors and baling facilities for various recyclable materials.
The facility will also house offices for city officials and the operator of the facility, as well as a training centre for waste management education.
The new development will also provide a nine-bay drop-off facility that will accept builders’ rubble, mixed waste, garden waste, as well as recyclables not taken by the MRF.
“We are very pleased to see that the work on site is progressing so well that it is ahead of schedule,” says City of Cape Town Urban Waste Management MMC Grant Twigg.
“The project is the next key step in the city’s strategy to fundamentally change our relationship with waste and to minimise our city’s need for additional landfills in future.
“This will allow thousands more families to start cleaning and separating recyclables from their general waste for collection by the city.”