Work starts on new Fraser Coast recycling centre

The first sod has been turned on a new Materials Recovery Facility which will sort material collected from Fraser Coast residents’ kerbside recycling bins.

The new Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) is being built for the Fraser Coast Regional Council at the Maryborough landfill in Saltwater Creek Road by Cleanaway.

It will replace the current MRF at Dundowran which has reached the end of its working life and no longer meets industry best practice due to its configuration and the age of the equipment, Cr David Lee said.

“Our Waste Strategy aims to reduce waste to landfill and unfortunately, the current recycling centre cannot be upgraded to the required modern standards,” he said.

“About 20 per cent of the material going through the current facility ends up in landfill.

“We anticipate that the new more efficient plant will reduce the level of material ending up in landfill to between 10 and 15 per cent of volume. This is a significant reduction in the amount of material going to landfill.

“The new facility will have more automation to extract recyclables, producing a better-quality product that will unlock markets for the recyclables you place in your yellow-lid recycling bin.

“It will open the potential to introduce closed-loop-systems to make products like park benches or planking from recycled plastic, or products from recycled cardboard such as cat litter.

“The cleaner the sorted material, the better our chance of finding markets.”

Council will also save money by funding the building of the new $31 million plant, which is due to be completed by the end of 2024.

“A financial analysis of the different funding options contained in the recyclables processing contract, demonstrated that we could save $7 million over the life of the 10-year contract by directly funding the building of the new MRF,” Cr Lee said.

The current MRF processes annually about 10,000 tonnes of mixed recyclables from the kerbside collection of yellow-lid recycling bins.

Of that material about half is a mix of paper and cardboard.

Each month the plant recovers:

• 135 tonnes of glass;
• 4 tonnes of aluminium;
• 14 tonnes of steel;
• 49 tonnes of carboard, and;
• 410 tonnes of a paper and cardboard mix.