Visiting the Materials Recovery Facility
Schools from Nottinghamshire can attend free visits to the Materials Recovery Facility. We offer an educational workshop about recycling plus a tour of the Materials Recovery Facility. For more information, visit nottinghamshire.veolia.co.uk/mrf-visit-for-schools
Our sessions take place in our on-site education room and include a tour of the Materials Recovery Facility along our visitor walkway. Here's what to expect when you bring your class on a visit.
Arrival
School visits start from 10am and can start as late as 1pm. Visits usually last between 2-2.5 hours, depending on your class's size. We have a dedicated coach drop-off point for schools outside of the facility. We ask that the class disembark the coach and walk down the footpath to our Education and Visitor Centre.
Recycling Workshop
Once you have arrived, you will enter our Education Room, where your students can find their seats and adults can help themselves to refreshments. Your host will ask for a list of names so we know who is on site in the event of an emergency and show you where facilities like the toilets are located. We will then go through the health and safety briefing, including what PPE we need to wear on the tour and show you where the fire assembly point is.
We will then start our education session which usually lasts an hour and is designed to be informative and interactive with different activities built into the session. We'll talk about what can and can't be recycled and how children can know if an item is recyclable or not. They'll be able to put this into practice by workig in teams to decide which bin a selection of common household waste items should be placed in. We'll also talk about how we sort all of Nottinghamshire's recycling waste at our Materials Recovery Facility, what happens to the material after it leaves our site and what happens the waste that you throw in the general waste bin.
Tour of the facility
Tours of the facility are limited to 18 children with at least 2 accompanying adults. If your class size exceeds 18, we will take the first group on a tour of the facility whilst the second group completes recycling-themed activity sheets in the Education Room and then swap over. Tours usually last around 25 minutes.
Before touring the facility, we will put on our PPE equipment: a hard hat, hi-vis jacket, headphones & receiver. If any vsitors where hearing aids or have a hearing implant, please speak to a member of the team at Veolia to make arrangements. Once the group have all the necessary equipment on, we will go over the health and safety rules one more time and then make our way over to the facility.
To get into the facility, we must cross a double pedestrian crossing and climb the external staircase. Please note, in the event of bad weather, it may not be possible to safely enter the facility, and the tour may be cancelled. Once inside the facility, everyone must stay on the visitor route marked by the red line up to the viewing platform. Your guide will explain the process of sorting the mixed recycling into each material. After everyone has asked any questions they have and looked around the facility, we will make our way along the red line towards the exit and return to the Education Centre.
After the Tour
After the tour(s) are complete, we will remove all of our equipment and wash our hands thoroughly (it is very dusty in the facility). We'll gather in the Education Room for a few final bits of information, and if there is sufficient time, there will be a quiz based on everything that we have discussed during the visit.
It will then be time for you to gather your belongings, as well as take our free goody bag with stationery for the children and walk back up the footpath towards the coach to return to school.