News

The new MRF under construction

The Materials Recovery Facility being built in Wandsworth will sort recycling before it goes to re-processors.

New facility to sort recycling locally.

11 May 2009

A new Materials Recovery Facility, or MRF for short, is being built in Wandsworth to sort up to 84,000 tonnes of London’s recycling – that’s the equivalent in weight of over 11,000 double decker buses!

Recycling collected from households in Hammersmith and Fulham, Lambeth, Wandsworth and Kensington and Chelsea is currently delivered to the Western Riverside Transfer Station at Smugglers Way before it is transported by lorry to a MRF in Kent. It is then sent on to manufacturers for re-processing.

The new MRF will help increase London’s ability to sort recycling locally, significantly cutting vehicle journey times and reducing carbon emissions. Its state-of-the-art technology will also sort and separate a wider range of recyclables into individual material types. 

Construction work on the riverside MRF at Smugglers Way began in January 2009. When completed, the MRF will comprise a fully enclosed structure in keeping with the existing transfer station building. It will also include a visitors’ centre which will be open to local schoolchildren to learn more about the recycling process. The whole facility will be fully operational by the end of 2010.

Find out more about how your recycling is sorted.
Interesting Facts

Waste typically costs companies 4.5% of their turnover (source: Envirowise).

An average office could save thousands of pounds a year just by using both sides of A4 paper.