Committed for the long term

Over the years, Machinex has established itself as a leader in designing profitable, high-quality sorting systems for the recycling industry. After half a century of growth, Machinex wants to continue to make investments and deliver process solutions for its clients. With installations across North America, Europe and many other parts of the globe, we’re proud to have established ourselves as a world leader in the field. We’ve achieved this through a consistent focus on our customers’ success.

Sorting technologies expertise

Machinex will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2020. We can trace an inspiring journey driven by a forward-looking vision focused on developing and deploying proven solutions and new technologies. Regardless of our customers’ material streams and end-product goals, the experienced team at Machinex consistently optimizes our range of technology to help move our customers, and the industry, forward.

In changing markets like we’re experiencing today, there is no replacement for experience. It is our proven track record that helps to minimize the risk for our customers.

An ongoing commitment to R&D

Machinex has begun construction of a Technology Center, which we’ll complete before the end of 2019. This new facility will be the hub of research and development and advanced technology manufacturing at Machinex. It will encompass a testing laboratory and demonstration area. Our team responsible for automation and controls also will be housed here.

In response to our customers’ needs and changing market demands, our R&D team is continuously analyzing new technologies and refining our existing equipment to improve effectiveness and efficiency.

Clean fiber with optical sorting

Machinex has responded to the challenges of fiber export markets through advanced fiber line sorting solutions powered by our MACH Hyspec® optical sorter. Our units can offer positive or negative sorting capabilities, which can be adjusted to meet our clients’ operating needs. For example, old corrugated containers (OCC) and film easily can be removed from a fiber stream. This allows for tighter specifications to be met and allows a reduction of quality-control sorters.

We also recently completed a full design review of the MACH Hyspec® optical sorter. Our design engineers, in combination with R&D engineers, used detailed customer feedback to enhance the unit. Major advancements were made to enhance employee safety, and for service access to the unit, resulting in a 50 percent reduction in the time required for cleaning and maintenance.

As the use of our optical units continues to grow, this change will save countless man hours for the industry going forward.

SamurAI™ sorting robot

As sorting technologies experts, we strive to provide innovative equipment designs with superior performance. Over the past several years, Machinex has developed sorting technologies to achieve extremely high recovery and purity rates for recyclables. We’ve done this while also keeping focused on safety, ease of maintenance and uptime reliability.

Our SamurAI™ sorting robot, powered by artificial intelligence, is a suite of technologies that we’ve developed to assist our customers. The system offers the potential to lower labor costs and increase purities and recovery, deploying artificial intelligence systems that can underpin further system advances.

The SamurAI™ currently is being used primarily for the recovery of different types of recyclables on the reject quality control line. Therefore, we’re primarily capturing natural and colored high-density polyethylene (HDPE), polyethylene terephthalate (PET), other types of plastics, cartons containers and metals that were missed earlier.

We have also recently installed SamurAI™ units to ensure quality on HDPE, mixed plastics and aseptics. Our next step is to tackle fiber sorting.

The future: smart plants

At Machinex, we firmly believe that the future of the industry lies in big data management. This will allow full optimization and improved performance for sorting plants. The AI technology (located in different areas of the facility) become tools for collecting and processing this data.

Smart facilities are beginning to evolve, and we currently are establishing the foundation needed to collect and analyze essential data critical to making this a reality. These systems will assist in providing operators a clear view of what’s happening in their plants and how to respond. Eventually, we believe, this will lead to automatic adjustments on certain processing stages, assuring complete system optimization.

Long-term commitment gives Experience Results

As we enter 2020, and our 50th year, Machinex is proud of our accomplishments. More importantly, however, we are thankful for the tremendous clientele loyalty we have developed and it reflects that the customer’s experience is at the heart of our priority. Our worldwide track record of delivering successful, profitable and efficient sorting plants for processors is the cornerstone of that success.

The experienced team at Machinex looks forward to continuing to partner with our clients to help ensure their success in implementing the industry’s finest recyclables sorting plants.