The city of Phoenix Public Works Department celebrated the grand reopening Wednesday of one of the facilities where residents' household recyclables are sorted.

The 27th Avenue Materials Recovery Facility underwent a four-year renovation that replaced all the old sorting equipment with more modern sorting technology.

“This is a major investment in sustainability,” said Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego at a ribbon cutting ceremony for the renovated MRF. “This beautiful facility will help make sure that we can recycle more of what you put in your blue bin, and that we can make a higher profit from selling those items because they’ll be able to be reused more efficiently.”

With the ceremonial push of a button, Gallego started up the equipment. The new machinery will increase sorting accuracy and decrease material contamination, which makes the resulting bales of cardboard, paper, plastics and aluminum more valuable to buyers who remanufacture the materials into new products.

“Our state-of-the-art MRF features a front-end trommel, two ballistic separators, a sorting robot — we actually have a robot — and 11 optical sorters,” stated Lorizelda Stoeller, Assistant Public Works Director in a news release.

Following the recycling stream

When items go into blue, residential curbside bins, Public Works’ Solid Waste Division collects those recyclables from 420,000 households using the garbage trucks residents see every week. All recyclables are collected separately from the trash thrown into black curbside containers.

When a truck gets full, it heads to one of two transfer stations — either the 27th Avenue Transfer Station or to the North Gateway Transfer Station. The recyclables get loaded into a drum feeder that evenly disperses the items onto the initial conveyor belt system.

From there, the screens, separators, trommels, sorters, and other technology — along with staff from Balcones, the company that operates the facility — neatly separate materials from each other, processing about 30 tons per hour. 

“This upgraded machinery significantly increases our recovery compared to the previous system,” Stoeller stated in a news release. “It's our city's commitment to critical infrastructure to ensure that we can provide MRF operations for a growing city.”

By the end of the process, like materials are baled and loaded onto trucks to be shipped to remanufacturers.

“We are trying to be leaders in what we call the circular economy — taking things that might have once been trash and turning them into new, useful products,” Gallego stated.

History of the MRF

Housed within Phoenix’s 27th Avenue Transfer Station, the MRF originally opened in 1998 and began processing recyclables. By the year 2000, curbside collection of recyclables had expanded citywide, which led to the need for a second MRF. The North Gateway Transfer Station and MRF began operation in 2006.

After 13 years of operation, the 27th Avenue MRF was retrofitted with new equipment in 2011. Then, in 2020, the MRF at NGTS also got a retrofit.

In 2021, the 27th Avenue MRF closed for a complete rebuild. During the four-year renovation, all residential recyclables were still processed at North Gateway. The reconstruction involved the assembly and installation of Machinex equipment in the same footprint of the existing 27th Avenue facility space.

See a MRF in action

The Zero Waste Team offers free tours of the NGTS recycling facility every Thursday. Though its machines and technologies are not identical to 27th Avenue’s, the sorting process from start to finish is generally the same. To request a tour, please fill out the Zero Waste request form.

Editor's note: The above was republished from a city of Phoenix news release.