The City of Cape Town’s Urban Waste Management Directorate is pleased that the construction of a large material recovery facility (MRF) at the Coastal Park landfill site is progressing well.
About this Material Recovery Facility:
- It is designed to receive co-mingled clean and dry recyclables, and separate the materials so that they can be sold and used in manufacturing of new products.
- The MRF will create a minimum of 100 job opportunities.
- It is expected that the facility will create capacity for sorting 65 tons of recycled material per day. This will allow the City to extend its separation at source recycling collection programme significantly. Currently expansion of recycling services in Cape Town is 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 also has office facilities for the City and operator of the facility as well as a training centre for education on waste management.
- This new development will also provide thousands of households in the vicinity of Coastal Park with a new formal nine-bay drop-off facility, that will accept builder’s rubble, mixed waste, garden waste as well as recyclables not taken by the MRF. The drop off will also allow for waste reclamation to recover more recyclables and reusable items that would otherwise have ended up in the landfill site.
- The project has already won an award for excellence in constructiondue to innovative techniques used in the preparatory earthworks. Since then civil services, structural work, roads and heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) installation has also been completed on site.
- The facility is expected to start operating around mid-November 2024, but currently construction is progressing ahead of schedule.
The City’s Mayoral Committee Member for Urban Waste Management, Alderman Grant Twigg, visited the construction site of the planned Coastal Park Material Recovery Facility (MRF).
‘We are very pleased to see that the work on site is progressing so well that it is ahead of schedule. 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.
‘Increasing plastic pollution is also a global issue. It is affecting even very remote environments. Currently private collection of recycling is prohibitively expensive for many, and use of drop-offs is sometimes inconvenient, so I am very excited for completion of this facility. This will allow thousands more families to start cleaning and separating recyclables from their general waste for collection by the City.
‘In the meantime, we would like to encourage residents to take their recyclables, rubble and garden waste to our drop-off sites that are situated in various areas so that together we can help reduce the waste that goes to landfill,’ said Alderman Twigg.
Author: Bryan Groenendaal
