Riccoboni’s new oil filter recycling plant

Italy – A new oil filter recycling plant has been commissioned in Italy’s Piemonte region. The new line at Grassano S.p.a. stores and treats various hazardous and non-hazardous industrial wastes.

Part of the family-owned Riccoboni Group, which specialises in hazardous waste processing, Grassano focuses on the disposal of used oil and oil-contaminated waste. The new installation was supplied by MeWa Recycling Maschinen und Anlagenbau GmbH of Gechingen in Germany and replaces a plant at Grassano that was no longer compliant with state-of-the-art requirements and could not cope as required with increasing input quantities.

The new facility is capable of continuously processing 5 tonnes of oil filters per hour. Used oil filters consist to a large extent of iron and also smaller amounts of aluminium, while residual oil makes up around 20% of the material mix. Employees at Grassano initially sort gas cartridges, solid metal parts, textiles and other extraneous materials – such as brake discs – from the flow of material.

A UG series MeWa shredder then grinds material to a final grain size of less than 25 mm in a one-step process. This shredded material mix of iron, aluminium, paper, rubber and oil is transferred to a centrifuge where it is cleaned. The oil is separated and stored in tanks. The remaining material is virtually dry and can be divided into iron and non-iron streams via a magnetic separator. An eddy current separator then takes out the aluminium.

At the end of this entire process, there is less than 2% oil remaining on the individual fractions. Grassano procures its oil filters from within Italy and also from neighbouring countries France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia.