Peel Integrated Material Recovery Facility

Peel’s Integrated Waste Management Facility on Torbram Road in Brampton is the largest of its kind in Canada, covering an area the size of three and a half soccer fields.

Every weekday 180 trucks arrive to unload either garbage or recycling. Serving 375,000 households and 1.2 million people, in total the centre processes over 300,000 tonnes a year.

A central component of the operation is the Material Recovery Facility, which processes recyclable materials. Highly mechanized, the plant has been designed to separate paper, plastic, metal and glass from a single stream, so residents don’t have to sort at home. About 70 per cent of the material that arrives at the facility is cardboard or newspaper.

Though screens, magnets, air guns and other techniques are employed to achieve mechanical separation, there is also a significant human workforce dedicated to manual sorting on a series of rapidly moving conveyor belts.

The Peel sorting station relies on both mechanized systems and workers who separate paper, plastics and metals from a single stream of items. Photo by Pete Paterson.

Hundreds of truckloads of separated, baled materials are shipped out from the facility each week to industries that manufacture goods from the recycled material. One such customer is Blue Mountain Plastics in Shelburne. It processes more than 3.5 billion plastic bottles each year – no doubt including those from blue boxes in these hills. As Brandon Muir, operations manager at Green For Life, put it, “It’s amazing how far some stuff travels to get back to where it started.”

You can see a video of Peel’s Integrated Waste Management Facility on YouTube.

Sorting Stacking Shipping ~ A Trip Through Peel’s Material Recovery Facility