Michigan county commissions Machinex MRF
Machinex has announced the commissioning of a new residential and commercial single-stream material recovery facility (MRF) in Marquette County, Michigan, that was designed to address the challenges of rural recycling. The Plessisville, Quebec-based systems integrator says the project is the result of cooperation among Machinex, the Marquette County Solid Waste Authority and Resource Recycling Systems (RRS), Ann Arbor, Michigan.
The county received a $3 million interest-free loan from New York-based Closed Loop Fund and an $800,000 grant from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy to build the $6.3 million facility as part of funding the state allocated to recycling infrastructure in 2018. RRS helped the county to find the funding opportunities.
“Simply, we saw an opportunity to improve recycling not only in Marquette County but the Upper Peninsula as a whole,” Bradley Austin, director of operations at Marquette County Solid Waste Management Authority, says of the new MRF. “The challenges of rural area recycling needed to be addressed in a more regional frame of mind. People in Upper Michigan want to recycle; however, recycling capacity and education was lacking in many parts of the region.
“This facility is designed to process recyclables from the entire region, and the hope is that with this new infrastructure and solid education in place, participation in recycling will increase across the entire territory,” Austin adds.
This MRF is automated, which, Machinex says, is an asset for the county’s municipalities because they lack laborers to staff the facility. With the capacity to sort 10,000 to 15,000 tons per year, the system includes a back-scraping drum to ensure input material is at a consistent depth, a Mach OCC screen, a fines screen to separate glass, a Mach ballistic screen to separate containers from glass and paper, a magnet to remove ferrous metals and a Machinex two-ram baler.
To sort polyethylene terephthalate and high-density polyethylene containers, a SamurAI robot was installed, creating a loop that allows for better recovery rates and reduces the need for human sorters, according to Machinex.
Austin says Machinex’s organization during the process was “impressive,” adding, “The ability to bring all phases of the project together and then execute speaks to the attention to detail by the entire Machinex team.”
“It’s hard to believe that Brad reached out to Machinex in August 2017 with his original vision,” says Chris Hawn, CEO of High Point, North Carolina-based Machinex Technologies Inc. “Through initial discussions at trade shows, we were able to blend our visions of the rural MRF of the future. From the time we first visited Marquette, Michigan, in early November 2017, Machinex was heart-set on earning this business. With both a great operator and a good story, nothing was going to stop us from making this a success.”
Stadler opens Test and Innovation Center in Slovenia
Stadler, Altshausen, Germany, has opened a Test and Innovation Center at its production site in Krsko, Slovenia. The company says its new facility will serve as a test center for customer demonstrations and as an innovation center housing the company’s research and development activities focused on the plastic sorting process.
At the new Test and Innovation Center, Stadler says it offers sorting process demonstrations, including feeding, label removal, ballistic separation, ferrous and nonferrous metal separation, near-infrared separation and conveyors and screw conveyors to transport material.
In a news release on its new Test and Innovation Center, Stadler says the site “will help customers make an informed purchase decision” as they will be able to see the sorting process in the plant designed for them by Stadler. The company says the facility also will provide training for customers and internal staff.
The Test and Innovation Center houses the company’s testing activities for plastic recycling applications, with input material being sorted into polymer products.
“This activity is very important for us at Stadler,” says Tom Schmitt, sales manager at Stadler. “We are constantly striving to offer increasingly efficient processes in the recycling of polymers.”
Stadler says the Test and Innovation Center is housed in an existing building on its Krsko site, which has been extended with a temporary structure, providing a total covered area of nearly 13,000 square feet to accommodate the equipment. The company adds that it plans to further develop the site to extend its testing and demonstration capabilities.
The center is staffed with a team of five people and is supported by engineers based on-site.
The Krsko site is a manufacturing and engineering hub that Stadler says plays a key role in the company’s operation.
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