Stadler sells 1,000th ballistic separator

Stadler Anlagenbau GmbH, Altshausen, Germany, has announced that it has hit a milestone by producing and selling its 1,000th ballistic separator.

According to a news release from Stadler, the ballistic separator was purchased by Vaersa, a company that provides waste management and remediation services in the Valencia region of Spain. The STT5000_6_1 ballistic separator was delivered Sept. 28 to Vaersa’s light packaging sorting plant in Castellón, Spain.

“We are pleased to be working with Stadler,” says Noelia Almiñana, head of Vaersa’s waste management department.

Luis Sánchez, director of operations at the Spanish Stadler Selecciona SLU, says the demand for ballistic separators in the Spanish market has risen fast, driven by the automation of recycling plants. He says without ballistic separators, these recycling facilities wouldn’t be able to achieve as much automation. “Today, more than 75 percent of recycling plants in Spain rely on [ballistic separators],” he says.

Stadler says the company has been pioneering its ballistic separator technology for many years. The company says development started in the early 1990s, and Stadler’s first four STT2000 units were delivered in 1992 to Fischer for its sorting plant in Ravensburg, Germany.

“Today our ballistic separators are very effective and extremely durable, but the initial development wasn’t easy,” says Willi Stadler, CEO of Stadler Anlagenbau GmbH. “It was very difficult at the time to build a machine robust enough to endure the challenges of waste. We didn’t have a specially developed shaft, so we purchased one from the agricultural sector. However, this shaft was not designed for use with waste and wasn’t as durable as we would have liked.”

According to Stadler, Fischer purchased two additional machines for its sorting plant in Villingen-Schwenningen. Fischer was later acquired by Remondis, which is still a Stadler customer, the company says.

In 1996, Stadler says it introduced its first ballistic separator featuring a shaft developed in-house and 100 percent original components. The machine was purchased by Germany-based Böhme for its packaging sorting plant. Böhme says Stadler’s ballistic separators remain an important part of its sorting plant. “Reliable separation of fines and the separation of 2D and 3D material are standard here,” says Stefan Böhme, CEO of Böhme. “For a long time, we have been using air support to discharge the 2D material to generate a large part of our film fraction for manual resorting. A very big advantage for the overall sorting quality is also the excellent material distribution for subsequent units, which is generated by the ballistic separator.”

Stadler notes that its ballistic separators have evolved over time. In 2000, the company introduced its patented pivoting frame, which eliminated the need to tilt the entire machine and adjust the conveyors, and the paddles with screened perforation.

In 2002, Stadler extended its offering of the STT2000 ballistic separators with a new model developed for separating paper and cardboard, featuring its patented Z-shaped paddles.

That same year, Stadler launched its STT5000 for heavy materials, such as municipal solid waste (MSW) and industrial waste. The STT5000 featured a shaft designed to withstand moist waste and extra robust paddles for processing flows of heavy materials.

More recently, Stadler identified a new demand for processing extra heavy material, and to address this requirement, it developed the STT6000 for sorting construction and demolition waste, landfill mining and MSW with large impurities. “There is no need for presorting or preshredding the input,” says Christian Nordmann, assistant head of research and development at Stadler, of the STT6000. “Also, differently from screening drums, which separate the material only in two fractions, the three-fraction output of the STT6000 means that impurities can be easily removed, as they are still in their original size.”