Recycling City Bern

September 2017 saw Recycling City, located right next to the motorway in Bern-Wankdorf, open for business. Particularly eye-catching is the giant 6500 m² steel hangar for recycling waste paper and plastics. It is connected to an up-to-the-minute, secure concrete building measuring 1000 m² where document shredding takes place. The facility sorts waste paper, separates recyclable materials from waste, and destroys confidential paperwork.

Directly and securely to its destination.

The owner of this groundbreaking facility is Balmelli-Immob AG, part of Lausanne’s Barec Group, a pioneer in the field of recycling. The data and document shredding plant is now expertly managed by Datarec (founded in 1993), a subsidiary of the Barec Group and Securitas AG. Securitas takes care of the secure transport of sensitive cargo by providing Datarec customers with special waste containers featuring individual access rights. The vehicles boast the latest equipment, including cameras, black boxes and transponders that switch transmission frequency every two minutes.

Secure irreversible destruction.

On arrival at Recycling City, the vehicles pass through a secure interlock door system, behind which the containers are unloaded and the sensitive contents transferred to a special shredder. This technological marvel is capable of shredding an impressive five tonnes of material an hour. The output is so small that recovery is impossible.  

We were entrusted with the safety of Recycling City, which is why we equipped the entire site with a state-of-the-art SecuriFire fire alarm system. Tried-and-tested SecuriStar combined smoke and heat detectors were installed in areas with normal ceiling heights. The challenge, however, lay in monitoring the huge hangars, where the voluminous amounts of paper dust posed a challenge. Following an exploratory test phase, we fine-tuned the sensitivity of our SecuriBeam ILIA. This linear smoke detector works by evaluating its surroundings with beams of infrared light and detecting not only smoke-related attenuations, but also typical modulation frequencies caused by unusual temperature increases and flames.