Equipment report

Baetsen Recycling adds Sennebogen electric handler at Netherlands facility

Baetsen Recycling, headquartered in Veldhoven, Netherlands, has added a Sennebogen 821 Electro material handler to presort construction and demolition materials at its Ekkersrijt yard in the Netherlands.

The family-run company added the electrically powered E-series machine in July 2014 to replace an excavator that had reached the end of its service life, Sennebogen reports.

Founded in the 1960s as a small transport company, Baetsen offers a range of services associated with the transport and disposal of building materials as well as crane hire, waste containers, excavation and demolition.

The company’s 8.5-hectare Ekkersrijt location includes two sorting plants for construction and demolition materials. The company is using the Sennebogen 821 Electro at the beginning of the sorting process. Powered by a 90-kilowatt electric motor, the machine sorts building and demolition materials into eight grades. Sennebogen says the machine saves energy and is easy on the environment.

The custom-equipped machine was delivered by Sennebogen’s local sales and service partner Kuiken N.V., which handles regular service, offers spare parts supply and operates a service network in the Netherlands.

Baetsen’s 821 Electro is positioned centrally on a ramp, offering a reach of 11 metres. The machine is operated approximately 10 hours per day and sorts up to 120,000 tonnes of material per year, Sennebogen reports.

Facility Manager Marc Peperkamp says the material handler offers up to 50% savings in both energy and operating costs.

Machinex tapped for Scotland EfW project

Machinex, based in Plessisville, Quebec, has been selected by the global construction company M+W Group to provide a material recovery facility (MRF) for the energy from waste (EfW) project of Levenseat Renewable Energy Limited in Lanark, Scotland, United Kingdom.

The facility, scheduled to be operational in 2017, is expected to make a significant contribution toward Scotland’s Zero Waste Plan, according to Machinex.

M+W Group, based in Stuttgart, Germany, is the main contractor for the €150 million EfW facility. Plans call for the system to be a refuse-derived fuel (RDF) and solid recovered fuel (SRF) preparation plant designed to process 42 tonnes of commercial and industrial waste per hour as well as municipal solid waste.

According to Machinex, the MRF will produce a minimum of 100,000 tonnes per year of RDF as a feedstock for the Levenseat EfW plant, while also maximising the recovery of high value recyclates such as paper, cardboard, plastics, metals and wood. The system also will produce an SRF stream from the light and high-calorific nonrecyclable materials.

To meet the objectives of the plant, Machinex says it will use four shredders, one Machinex trommel, one waste screen, three air separators, two Machinex ballistic separators, three Machinex Mach Hyspec optical sorting units, one fluidized bed dryer and two Machinex single-ram balers.

To help ensure the quality of the RDF recovered from the wet organic waste, a fluidized bed drying technology will be used. This continuous dryer is self-sustainable and will use a small fraction of the heat generated by the waste-to-energy plant located adjacent to the MRF, the company says.

Jonathan Menard, Machinex project director, comments, “In my opinion, the system incorporates the ideal balance between the generation of controlled and homogeneous RDF and SRF products, while maximising the capture of high value recyclates and ultimately significantly maximising the waste diversion to landfill.”

Menard adds that the system is designed with flexibility to offer numerous options to deal with varying input streams. “Looking to the future, we took care to predesign several future upgrades to ensure the evolution of the plant.”

Pierre Paré, CEO of Machinex Group, says, “We are delighted to have been selected for this first-of-kind project in Scotland. This project will allow Machinex to once again reaffirm its expertise and capability in the fuel preparation market. For us this project represents a significant milestone in our European business development. Our adventure in the United Kingdom started more or less five years ago, and we are extremely proud of the track record we have established considering the large scale and the high complexity of our installations in this country.”

Angus Hamilton, director at Levenseat Ltd., comments, “We are really looking forward to working with Machinex on delivering this project. All throughout the tendering process we were impressed with Machinex’s enthusiasm. They listened to and understood our requirements and produced a design that aligned perfectly with what we were aiming to achieve.”

Stena installing Metso shears in Sweden

Sweden-based Stena Recycling AB has installed the first of what it says will be five high-capacity Metso shears. The first shear has been installed at the company’s facility in Skövde, Sweden.

Over the next two years four more shears will be installed at different Stena locations in Sweden, providing the company “with the capacity to process larger volumes than before [so] more raw materials can be delivered to foundries and steel mills in Sweden and other markets,” the company says in a news release.

“This will give a great boost to our production capabilities; these new high-quality, energy efficient machines from Metso are the best in Europe,” says Staffan Persson, president of Stena Recycling, which has more than 160 facilities in Scandinavia and Poland. “In short, this provides an injection of power to our recycling capacity in Sweden.”

Stena Recycling and Metso have entered into a partnership “to ensure optimised use of the equipment at each facility,” according to the Stena news release.

The new shears will offer a “significantly higher capacity” than the “several decades old” models that they are replacing, according to Stena. In Skövde, capacity has increased by 400%, the company says.

The overall increase will be in the range of 150,000 to 200,000 tonnes per year by the time all five machines are operating.

“Increased capacity prepares us for the future and means that we can handle larger volumes for our customers,” says Persson. “We can return more raw material back into circulation for the manufacturing of new products. With annual production reaching several hundred thousand tonnes, metal recycling offers huge environmental benefits.”

Sesotec contributing to EU Polymark project

Equipment and technology company Sesotec (formerly S+S Separation), based in Schönberg, Germany, reports that it is helping to develop solutions for identifying and sorting marked polymers as a member company within the European Commission (EC) three-year Polymark consortium and project.

The project, funded by the EC, was kicked off in June of 2014 under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). The mission of the project is to increase the availability of recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET) for the production of new beverage containers. According to the EC, Polymark members are working to develop a technology for the automated detection and sorting of usable PET bottles.

The EU-funded project has a budget of €2.2 million, of which the EU has contributed close to €1.5 million. According to Sesotec, Polymark aims to maximise the value from recycling and the reuse of PET while meeting EU rules on the reuse of food contact and nonfood contact PET. The company says the technology it is developing will distinguish between food-contact plastics and nonfood contact plastics, aiming to further optimise the high-value plastic scrap stream for food-contact end uses.

U.K. recycler adds container sort line

Blackburn, United Kingdom-based Rishton Paper has recently purchased and installed a new container sort line from Ken Mills Engineering Ltd. (KME), headquartered in the U.K.

Rishton Paper is a family-run business established in 1984 by managing director Bill Braysford. Located at Riverside Industrial Estate, the site of the former Rishton Paper Mill, the site consists of a 743-square-metre warehouse and a yard capable of storing up to 1,000 tonnes of scrap paper and recyclables.

The recycling company contacted KME Ltd. to help design and build a container sort line. KMR says the resulting system is capable of handling 3 tons per hour of clean mixed containers without glass. The sorting conveyor has five positions in total with two for picking out contaminants and also any recyclable products to be kept separate from mixed plastics.

The sort system has an infeed conveyor, 9-metre sort conveyor with bunkers, Master Magnets overband magnet and eddy current separator with vibrating feed table. The system was designed and built in-house at KME’s facility in England.

According to KME, should Rishton Paper wish to add a glass screen at the front end, the current layout of machinery has been positioned to accommodate that.