Greater social awareness about the environmental impact of packaging is increasing the amount of bags deposited in yellow containers, to which new waste collection contracts such as those in Barcelona or Cornellà de Llobregat are also contributing, promoting selective collection, either with systems such as door-to-door or smart containers. This growth in plastic that is taken for recycling has led to the need to expand the capacity of the Gavà-Viladecans sorting plant, from where packaging is separated and pressed, serving half of the municipalities in the Barcelona Metropolitan Area (AMB).
The waste treatment center has added a new shift to be able to process all the packaging unloaded by garbage trucks, making it work 24 hours a day for five days. With three shifts, eight hours each, the annual capacity has increased from 24,000 tons of packaging per year to 33,000, almost 40% more. To be able to increase processing capacity, 1.5 million annually will be invested, a budget that includes the hiring and training of personnel for the new night shift, with the incorporation of 16 workers. The total workforce stands at 50 employees.
With an area of six hectares and fully automated, the Gavà-Viladecans plant is operated by the Tersa group, a public company participated by the Barcelona Metropolitan Area (AMB) and the Barcelona City Council. One of its subsidiaries is Semesa, responsible for packaging selection. To serve the 36 metropolitan municipalities, the Gavà-Viladecans center is complemented by another in Montcada i Reixac.
The growth registered at the Baix Llobregat plant is in line with what is happening in the rest of Catalonia, where there are a total of 13 packaging selection centers. In Catalonia, Ecoembes, a private organization that acts as a technical advisor to the selection plants, foresees a year-on-year growth of 7% in recycled plastics in 2022, above the Spanish average. In 2021, 279,000 tons of packaging were recycled in this autonomous community.
Precisely, this increase intensifies in the metropolitan area of Barcelona, standing at 10%, due to the change in the cleaning and waste collection contract of the Catalan capital, where the new contract wants to further incentivize selective collection. "Barcelona is acting as a tractor for the metropolitan area," values Enric Ibañez, coordinator of Ecoembes in Catalonia, who estimates the increase in recycled plastics in the city to be up to 15% when the new contract is fully deployed. The increase in plastic recycling has also been influenced by changes in the contracts of Sant Just Desvern and Cornellà de Llobregat, with the implementation of smart containers, and in Ripollet, where a door-to-door collection system has been established.
More than 100 garbage trucks per day
More than 100 garbage trucks pass through the Gavà-Viladecans sorting plant every day. They are responsible for bringing the containers collected in the yellow bins. Once unloaded, they are poured onto belts that separate them according to their type: bricks, bottles, cans, tubs, caps, aerosols, trays, or aluminum wrappers, among others.
Initially, a machine filters them by size, depending on whether they are bottles or bags, and discards material that cannot be recycled, 30% of everything taken to the yellow bins. On the belts, one can see organic matter, cardboard, toys, footwear, clothes, tires, wood... Even bank statements.
Then, the bags are broken, and the containers pass through optical and metallic separators, which redirect them to the corresponding lines according to the type of plastic they are. Afterwards, a manual check is performed in case any phase has failed, and they are then pressed. The bales resulting from the process are sent to recycling companies or auctioned.