How Mr. Murph Does It

Have you ever wondered how Mr. Murph recovers all the valuable recyclables we throw away everyday?

As the home to Oklahoma’s only licensed Material Recovery Facility (Mr. Murph), we are able to recover over 200 tons of recyclables per day from the waste stream–things like paper, cardboard, aluminum, glass and plastics– thanks to Mr. Murph’s advanced recycling automation.

Here’s how he does it…

·  First, trash from the tipping floor is loaded into a hopper and as it is transported up the conveyor belt it is metered for consistent volume.

·  As incoming material moves along the conveyer belt, workers pull out large items and those materials not capable of being recycled. Unusable garbage is also picked at this time. These items are placed in a bin and will be transported for a final destination, which will recover the energy through incineration.

·  The recyclables continue down the conveyor belt to the first stage, a three-tier sorting system. The screener allows the cardboard to float on the top of the discs and 3D material falls below. Since glass is the heaviest material, it is crushed between steel plates and drops to the bottom level and then transferred to the glass cleanup system.

·  The recyclables are then passed through a polisher which separates out the newspaper materials. This is then quality checked and placed in a bin for later baling.

·  The next polisher will remove all the remaining fiber (mixed paper) with the same quality check stations and bin storage for later processing.

·  Mr. Murph sorters are trained throughout the process to ensure all items are sorted accurately. As a result, the amount of contamination in the final recycling bale is greatly reduced—giving us a 95% recovery rate in our single stream.

· Now that all fiber and glass have been removed, we can send the remaining 3D objects, such as aluminum, metal and plastic to the second stage of processing. 
The metal is pulled from the conveyor stream by a cross belt magnet; this pulls metal, tin cans and all other ferrous material.

· The next stage is an anti magnet called an eddy current. This machine creates a force field that repeals the aluminum up an over a divider while forcing the plastic to fall down into the next stage of optical scanning.

·  The first pass of optical scanning separates the PET (plastic #1) from HDPE (Plastic #2). The PET plastic is color commingled with lids and labels attached.

·  The final optical scanning pass separates the natural (clear) HDPE from the colored. The Optical Scanner can identify which plastics have color and which do not. By identifying each container’s position on the belt, colored plastic is blown into a bin while clear plastic falls off the belt and into a separate bin.

·  When all materials are sorted, each one is pushed onto a conveyer belt that brings them to the baler. The baler compresses the material to be shipped off to create new products 
from the recycled material. Each bale can weigh anywhere from 1,000 to 1,500 pounds.

·  All recyclables are compacted and bailed onsite, making it easier and cheaper to transport to companies that can turn this material into new products and energy.