Machinex has upgraded the single-stream municipal recycling facility of West County Resource Recovery, located in Richmond, California. This project is the result of a cooperation between Machinex and its client, Republic Services, to modernize the existing facility for additional sorting capacity. This upgrade was specifically designed to face the challenges of the existing building while completely upgrading the system.
This plant already had an older system designed and installed by another equipment vendor. The customer was running approximately 15 TPH and some of the older equipment was no longer working and had been taken offline. Machinex was asked to upgrade the system in order to increase processing capability without adding to the current sorter count and to eliminate rubber disc screens.
New features of the system include a triple-deck MACH OCC screen with a fines screen underneath to remove the system fines early in the process. The new OCC screen features improved disc spacing and larger shafts to reduce daily cleaning. Two MACH ballistic separators were installed to handle the primary and secondary (finishing) 2D/3D separation, and, since they have no rubber discs or shafts, they help to reduce downtime and overall maintenance costs. Machinex was chosen for this upgrade thanks to its capacity to provide and deliver a solution that increases tonnage while having the same number of sorters.
This upgrade required some additional automation to meet this challenge. A MACH Hyspec dual-eject optical sorter has been incorporated to remove both PET (#1) and HDPE (#2) at the start of the container line. A new magnet and eddy current separator have also been installed for ferrous and non-ferrous recovery. Features of this system make it reliable, efficient, and flexible. The new MRF will be able to process more recyclables with the capacity to sort 22 to 24 tons per hour.
Design challenges included working with the existing infeed pit along with putting together a design that utilized the existing baler and storage bunker setup.
"We needed two ballistics in order to achieve the processing capacity goals set forth by the client," says Rusty Angel, a regional sales manager at Machinex. "We utilized their existing drum feeder for the system infeed and also reused many of the existing bunkers at the front end of the system such as the pre-sort bunkers and commodity bunkers since those were all live bottom bunkers and already in place. We did have to add one new walking floor bunker for the ferrous metals as they did not have enough bunkers to accommodate all of the recovered materials."
Machinex worked alongside Republic to bring its expertise with creative design for retrofits. Customer requirements were to select a partner that would be able to guide them through this major system upgrade, along with providing them with a maintenance-friendly system that could increase the recovery of recyclable material.
