‘Advanced’ facility to help recycler cope with China’s scrap import controls

Australia – Major Australian recycler Cleanaway has opened a 50-tonnes-per-hour single-stream materials recovery facility in Perth. Manufactured by Bulk Handling Systems (BHS), it has the capacity to process 250 000 tonnes per year, claimed to be enough to sort all of the city’s residential recyclables.

According to Cleanaway, this is the ‘most advanced’ recycling facility in the southern hemisphere, applying an abundance of recovery technologies to achieve high rates of throughput while maximising the recovery and purity of recycled commodities.

BHS’ Tri-Disc screens are said to be the core of the sorting process, screening out glass and producing clean paper and container streams. Debris Roll Screens are employed early in the process to quickly break and remove the high volumes of glass that are typical in Australia, followed by purification using two Nihot single-drum separators.

Throughout the plant, RT optical sorters are employed in both recovery and quality control applications. Two optical sorters, capable of analysing the colour of opaque objects, remove small pieces of cardboard from the news stream. To achieve Cleanaway’s extremely high standard of more than 97% recovery of plastic containers while meeting purity rates in excess of 98.5%, six optical units target fibres and polymers to produce PET, HDPE and mixed plastics.

‘This multi-million-dollar facility is a major step forward in both infrastructure and technology and will take recycling in Western Australia to a whole new level of quality and purity,’ contends Cleanaway’s ceo Vik Bansal.

David Williamson, the company’s general manager for Western Australia, claims the high-tech facility has an unmatched capability designed to address Perth’s recycling needs for the next decade and beyond. ‘With the city’s population set to reach 3 million by 2020, Perth households and businesses will be producing more waste than ever before,’ he points out.

The company also claims to now have what it describes as ‘a distinct competitive advantage in the age of China’s National Sword programme’ targeting low-quality imports.