Meet the MRF!/The Cycle of Recycling

Have you ever wondered where our food waste and recycling go once you throw your trash away? Most of our waste collected here at UCI is taken to Waste Management in Orange. Waste Management is an environmental service company that partners with communities, such as UCI, to provide waste disposal and recycling services that help in creating renewable energy. Most of UCI’s commingled recycling and food waste ends up in this facility, so you can see why it would be important to throw our waste into the correct bins, right? The process of being sustainable does not end at the bins; there is a whole other process that assists in turning our recycled waste into reusable material.

Waste Management operates two transfer stations in the cities of Irvine and Orange. Here recyclables are sorted apart from materials that cannot be recycled. Unrecyclable materials are then loaded onto tractor-trailers to be hauled to landfill. Our commingled recycling, collected here at UCI, is processed through the Material Recovery Facility Recycling Center, or the MRF for short. In the MRF, all items that are placed in the recycling cart are separated and prepared for shipping to become new products.

In the school year of 2014/2015, UCI sent 908 tons of commingled recycling material to the MRF. Commingled recycling makes up the third largest section of the waste that UCI produces, which is about 9% of our total campus diversion rate. UCI currently has a diversion rate of 83%, which means that only 17% of the waste we produce on campus gets sent to landfills.

Because it makes up such a large portion of our campus diversion rate, the commingled recycling program and the MRF are extremely important. UCI Facilities Management has worked hard to improve helpful educational materials in order to increase our commingled recycling program. This year, UCI students revised and designed standardized signage for the campus recycling and refuse bins with the help of Strategic Communications. The signs use many

images and are color coordinated in order to create consistency and ease of understanding. All these factors assist UCI in reaching its goal of Zero Waste and a 95% diversion by 2020, and Waste Management is a proud partner with UCI and many other communities from places all around the state to help us achieve these goals.

To learn more about Zero Waste at UCI click here!

Take a closer look into the MRF!