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Section A Page 10 American Recycler, September 2008
EQUIPMENT
SPOTLIGHT
N
Single-stream collection of materials
promises to greatly increase participation
rates for municipal recycling programs. Consumers
have been shown to nearly double the
amount of material they divert away from
landfills and into recycling in communities
where single-stream recycling programs have
been initiated.
But commingling paper, glass, plastic,
metals and other recyclables in a single curbside
container also poses problems. While
participation rates usually rise, so does the
amount of waste generated by the recycling
effort. Plus, the recycled material may not be
as pure, which creates headaches for the
glassmakers, paper plants and others who
would reuse the materials.
One solution to the single-stream
conundrum is effective sorting of recyclable
materials. At National Recovery Technologies,
Inc. (NRT) in Nashville, Tennessee,
engineering manager John Thomsen says
their Multi Sort IR and Multi Sort IR ES
Combo and Spyder machines are the most
likely to go into single-stream applications.
“The main issue we confront is that containers,
plastic bottles and other similar sized
objects end up in a stream that needs to be
sorted by polymer and other characteristics,
says Thomsen.” “The part of that that we do
is to take out various polymers.”
Sorting PET is usually done first with
the Multi Sort IR using transmitted infrared.
“We consider that a more reliable detection
method. However, its use is limited to the
transparent and translucent objects,” notes
Thomsen. In a multi-stage process, materials
are then immediately separated into transparent
and opaque objects. The Spyder can be
used for further separation. “Instead of separating
the objects by color or transparency, it
is looking at the actual polymers,” says
Thomsen. For each detection system, controlled
compressed air jets are used to physically
separate materials from the rest of the
stream.
NRT has long sold sorting equipment to
companies reclaiming mixed bales of recycling
materials, and now is seeing good
growth from municipal and other mixed
recycling facilities. “Lately we’ve been very
busy,” Thomsen says. “This has always been
a cyclical business driven by the value of the
commodities being processed and public
interest and policy in recycling. Both of
those are currently driving an increase in this
kind of business.”
At General Kinematics in Crystal Lake,
Illinois, market director Bill Guptail says the
company’s vibratory finger screeners and
destoner classifiers are the main General
Kinematics products sold for single-stream
sorting applications. Finger screeners size
items for better downstream recovery, while
destoner classifiers are used to separate glass
and other heavy items.
“In a smaller facility where they’re going
to run different items such as commercial
waste, we’ll get a high percentage of old cardboard
cartons (OCC) to go over the top of the
screen and a high percentage of newspapers to
go through,” he says. “If it’s traditional singlestream,
where there’s no OCC, we’ll do a different
size and get newspaper to go over the
top of the screen and rigid commingled materials
to go through.”
Typically, materials are sent to optical
sorters for further separation after General
Kinematics’ vibratory screeners do some of the
heavy lifting. “That improves the ability of the
downstream equipment,” Guptail says of
multi-step sorting that starts with General
Kinematics equipment.
Glass is a special problem in singlestream,
and one addressed by Andela Products
Ltd. in Richfield Springs, New York.
Andela’s GP1 & GP2 glass pulverizers
plus trammels reduce glass in
mixed streams of recycling materials
to 3/8th inch or less fragments and
also removes sharp edges. Then the
glass is easier to separate using simple
screens. After dropping out of the
stream, the mixed glass is turned into
useful products such as roadbed,
cover, mulch, pipe bedding as well as
sandblasting & water filtration media.
Cynthia Andela, president and
chief operating officer, says, “In single-stream
recycling, the glass is a lot
of times forgotten. It’s hard to get it
out of the stream because it’s all broken
and mixed in with paper and
other things. We can put our equipment
in to drive the glass to smaller
sizes, all the way down to 3/8th inch
size and it doesn’t have any sharp
edges. Then we can screen it out. You
have simple mechanical separation.”
Andela’s system capacities vary
from 1 ton per hour to 20 tons per
hour. All comprise three major steps.
First, there is a hopper where material
enters and is metered. Next, a pulverizer
breaks down glass and rounds
edges. Finally, there is a screening
unit where glass falls through holes
and out of the material stream. Conveyors
tie it all together. Andela’s
pulverizer breaks the glass only while
leaving most other materials such as
paper and plastic alone. “We put a
magnet in the front of our systems to
pull out the major steel. Soft cans and
things like that aren’t a problem,”
Andela says.
Andela’s business has changed
mostly in the way recycling materials
are being handled. “There’s been
a shift over the last four or five years
to single-stream recycling because
you have a higher recycling rate at
• Automatic Sorting Technologies
Optical Sorting Equipment
Mechanical Sorting Screens
Radial Stacking Scrap Conveyors
Pdf downloaded from http://www.thepdfportal.com/0908_31652.pdf
the curb,” she says. “But it also means the
material is more mixed and the systems to
separate it become more expensive and more
involved. It’s brought to the forefront the
necessity of providing for value-added products.”
With that in mind, she spends much of
her time developing and educating recyclers
about viable applications for mixed glass
recovered from single-stream recycling systems.
At Karl W. Schmidt & Associates Inc. in
Commerce City, Colorado, national sales
manager Jeffrey Van Galder says the company
integrates sorting equipment from several
European manufacturers into the conveyor
belt systems it makes for single-stream applications.
Schmidt offers sorters based on technologies
including magnetic, eddy current,
disk screens, ballistic separators and optical.
Andela Products Ltd.
Magnetic Separation Systems, Inc.
National Recovery Technologies, Inc.
Sorting for
single-stream
recyclables
Manufacturer List
Andela Products Ltd.
John Andela
315-858-0055
www.andelaproducts.com
Austin AI, Inc.
Kristine Keily
512-837-9400
www.austinai.com
Eriez Magnetics
Al Gedgaudas
800-345-4946
www.eriez.com
General Kinematics
Bill Guptail
815-455-3222
www.generalkinematics.com
Green Machine Sales
John Green
800-639-6306
www.greenmachinesales.com
by Mark Henricks
Hustler Conveyor Company
Dave Guyton
636-441-8600
www.hustler-conveyor.com
Karl W. Schmidt & Associates, Inc.
Jeffrey B. Van Galder
303-287-7400
www.karlschmidt.com
Magnetic Separation Systems, Inc.
Felix Hottenstein
615-781-2669
www.magsep.com
Marathon Equipment
Renee Boman
800-269-7237
www.marathonequipment.com
National Recovery Technologies, Inc.
John Thomsen
800-467-4678
www.nrt-inc.com
Smalis Conveyors
Doug Smalis
800-348-0765
www.usaconvey.com
Steel Belt, Roller Chain, Drag Chain,
& Sliderbed Conveyors 303.287.7400 www.karlschmidt.com
Ballistic separators appeal to customers struggling
with disk separators that experienced frequent
downtime due to wire, plastic ties and plastic
bags wrapping around the disks and axles. “Ballistic
separation applies high frequency agitation to
the material through the use of paddles rather than
disks,” he explains. “We wanted to have an option
for people that were frustrated with disk screens.”
One of Schmidt’s most active markets consists
of smaller single-stream sorting centers processing
up to 200 tons a day, Van Galder says. He
looks for growth to continue. “There’s going to be
an ongoing high demand for these materials and it
comes back to collection and making it easy for the
material to enter the recycling stream,” he says. “I
think single-stream is going to keep on rolling.”