Ward 11 Alderman Brian Pincott | City of Calgary Office of the Aldermen

On June 4th, I and my staff had a chance to visit the new Materials Recycling Facility, or MRF (pronounced ‘merf’). It’s located in SE Calgary and has been accepting the recyclables being collected by the Blue Cart program since it rolled out in April.

The grand opening of the facility, complete with a “throwing of the on switch” by the Mayor, was a big press-attended event, and a great celebration of Calgary finally getting a real recycling program!

But… I wanted to see beyond that sanitized version of the MRF, clean and dressed up for all those guys in suits; I wanted to see and tour the MRF in full operation. I wanted to really get a sense of what is happening to all the “stuff” that we are now dumping into our Blue Boxes.

And, man, is there ever a lot of stuff that we are recycling! To see the MRF in full swing, sorting and recycling 40 tonnes an hour, 5-tonne truckload after 5-tonne truckload of recyclables being delivered, is an impressive sight. The sound and fury of environmental responsibility in action!

The “machine” that sorts the recyclables into its various components: cardboard, paper, plastic film, plastic bags, plastic containers, glass; fills the better part of the huge building! You climb up ladders to get above the various material streams and look down between the criss-crossing catwalks and conveyor belts whizzing in all directions, at all speeds. It can be quite disorienting, even giving you a touch of vertigo!

What is all the more amazing is that the people working in tandem on the line, sorting the material, checking to make sure that nothing gets past that shouldn’t, are doing this at the most amazing speeds. The eye-hand coordination to do this is incredible. Yes, a lot of it is done by machine, but there are human eyes and hands along the entire line. 80 people currently work in the MRF and there are plans to expand that up to 100 jobs.

At the end of it all, after the mounds and mounds of unsorted-recyclables are first unloaded and pushed onto the initial conveyor belt; after all the various materials are sorted whisked off on their own way, eventually ending up in bales of like materials; after what I am sure are miles travelled on conveyor belts throughout the “machine;” at the very end, falling from a hopper, is a fine drizzle of detritus that cannot be recycled, that is destined for the landfill.

Forty tons an hour, eight hours a day, five days a week: that’s 1600 tons of stuff a week that isn’t going to the landfill. And we still have one quadrant of the City to be brought on-stream! Just wait until we get even better at recycling! Wait until we are all on-board and figure out all the stuff that can be recycled from our homes!

It is an amazing start to the Blue Box program! We should all be proud of what we have accomplished and what we can accomplish in the future.

For photos of the MRF, check out the Gallery page.