Machinex upgrade at Republic's Greensboro MRF to boost recovery and reduce screen cleaning

Republic Services has modernized its material recovery and sorting facility in Greensboro, North Carolina. Quebec-based Machinex provided a significant equipment and system upgrade to Republic's 20-year old single-stream MRF, which re-started operation on schedule, April 9th. 

The update follows a recent renewal of Greensboro's municipal contract, whereby Republic needed to upgrade equipment to efficiently handle higher volumes of recyclables. According to Machinex, the upgrade increases productivity and recovery rates while reducing cleaning times for the MRF.

Machinex designed this new single-stream system to process 30 tons/hour of residential and commercial material, constructed within the current building while reusing some of the existing structural work and baler feed conveyors. The system includes a new drum feeder and infeed system, OCC screen, fines screen, three ballistic separators, a glass cleanup system, an optical sorter for PET and HDPE, as well as a new magnet and eddy current separator.

The main processing system is brand new and includes Machinex' proven ballistic separators as the primary and secondary screening devices, after the OCC and fines screens. Notably, no rubber discs are utilized in the entire system. Providing constant and reliable operation, ballistic separators will also minimize aluminum loss because they do not use rubber discs that can wear over time, thus increasing the initial screen opening. Its elliptical movement will also not wrap film or other stringy material, resulting in significantly less maintenance, downtime, and operational costs.

"Before having MACH Ballistic separators, the operator was spending three hours per day to clean their disc screens," said Rusty Angel, Eastern Region Sales Manager in the United States. "Since the upgrade, that has been reduced to only 10 to 15 minutes per day. Cleaning screens in MRFs is a big deal because, when you are cleaning screens, you are not producing the material. The upgrade, particularly the MACH Ballistic, helped the customer achieve a 95% runtime."

Angel added, "Our client liked our design and appreciated having our U.S. offices about 20 minutes away."