In a recycling plant, how much material can one person manually sort in one hour.?

Question

In a recycling plant, how much material can one person manually sort in one hour.?

Answer 1

I believe it depends on what sort of material people are sorting.  If the material coming in is pre-sorted (the type of stuff that you put on the curb in the blue bin, or from recycling drop-off centers) then it will be much easier to sort than if it is unsorted "black bag" waste.

A lot of the sorting is done semi-automatically.  Operators run different types of sorting machines, making sure that they don't get clogged, but they may not actually hand-sort each type of material.

The only concrete data I could find shows a total of 12 laborers working one shift per day who sorted 12,000 tons per year.  So that's about 1,000 tons per year per person.  It should be noted that the workers are prisoners on work furlough, who work for pennies an hour, so I don't know if they would sort more/better if they actually got paid a reasonable amount for their labor.

If you want to research this sort of thing further, it would likely be helpful to know that recycle-able materials typically go to a MRF - which either stands for Materials Recovery Facility or Materials Recycling Facility, depending on who you talk to.  It's at the MRF (pronounced murf rhymes with smurf) that the cans are separated from the bottles and plastic and paper and so forth.

Different MRF's recover different materials, so a lot will depend on what you mean by "sort."  Are you sorting different types of paper one from another, or are you just sorting paper from everything else?

Good luck!

Answer 2

about a full 2 foot bin if one works hard and maybe a few craps only if one is lazy

Answer 3

no one sorts manually!!  thats why containers are labled-paper,glass,plastic etc.  i work in a recycle center and if it isn't sorted it goes to the landfill.