Material Facilities (MFs)

Material Facilities (MFs) are defined within the Environmental Permitting (England & Wales) (Amendment) Regulations 2023 and treat a prescribed amount and type of Municipal Waste that has been collected for the purposes of preparing it for reuse or recycling.

These facilities are required to undertake extensive sampling of the input and output materials, and from October 2024 the range of materials and scope of sampling has increased to link to data required for the pEPR and DRS legislation. This type of infrastructure provides the overview of MFs facilities for England and Wales and the corresponding facilities in Scotland and Northern Ireland in the future, linking to individual pages for each facility that provides greater detail.

Overview

MF facilities are primarily focused on mixed or partially sorted dry recyclables from household and similar wastes (the definition of municipal waste) and their sorting into useable fractions.

Due to the definition in the legislation they can include a number of different types of MRF, including DMR focused MRFs and material-specific facilities such as PERFs and glass MRFs and from October 2024 can include transfer stations, bulking facilities and 'dirty MRFs'.

In WikiWaste, MFs are treated as a collective type in the wider Material Recovery Facility category, with a degree of overlap where some facilities are also captured in the other types. This page provides a structured view across the national fleet and connects through to individual facility pages and Local Authority disposal routes.

Parameters	Stats.	Units/Year
Number of Operational Facilities	97	number (2024)
Operational Plated Capacity	5,000	'000 tonnes (2024)
Plants in Construction	3	'000 tonnes (2024)
Plated Capacity in Construction	120	'000 tonnes (2024)
abc	000	xyz (2024)