Mingled recycling gets the automatic treatment

Tony Hughes puts the new waste sorter through its paces at the Waitakere Waste Station yesterday. Picture / Paul Estcourt

The largest recycling centre of its kind in New Zealand opens today.

The centre will service Waitakere and North Shore, the fourth- and fifth-largest cities in the country. More than 15,000 tonnes of glass, plastic, tin and aluminium will be collected every year from the two council areas, making it the only recycling centre able to process fully mingled material.

New trucks will collect the recycling from the blue-and-yellow wheelie bins.

Sorters at a conveyor belt will drop material down a chute, where it will be compacted and pushed into large bins to be processed and then either exported or used domestically.

A magnetic system, called a negative eddy current, will pull steel from the belt and repel aluminium into a separate bin. The system has not been used in recycling centres in New Zealand before.

Previously a worker would tip crates of recycling into the truck and then sort the material while the vehicle moved down the street.

Recycling service project manager Jon Roscoe said picking up about 57,000 crates per week caused a lot of back problems.

"It's best to get it off the street as quickly as possible and sort it here where it's safer."

He said the centre was only viable because of the volumes of recycling from the two councils.

Mr Roscoe hoped to be processing vegetable matter soon.

The new system should also reduce street litter as the bins will protect items from being blown about. The new bins are three times the size of the old crates.