Setting up for success

In the view of Bob Cappadona, vice president of resource solutions for Rutland, Vermont-based Casella Waste Systems, safety, productivity and quality must work in harmony when choosing to invest in a modern material recovery facility (MRF).

Those are not the only factors, though.

Thomas Brooks, chief technology officer at Eugene, Oregon-based Bulk Handling Systems Inc., believes MRF operators should find an equipment mix that works best for them based on what materials are coming in. Echoing this is Jeff Snyder, director of recycling at Cincinnati-based Rumpke Waste & Recycling, who believes new MRF investments should include a plan that anticipates future equipment upgrades to accommodate for changing commodity markets.

In early May, Cappadona, Brooks and Snyder joined San Francisco-based Recology Vice President and Region Manager of the Coast Region Ed Farewell and Rosemont, Illinois-based LRS Director of MRF Operations Mark Molitor for the session Seizing an Opportunity: The Rise of MRF Investments to discuss not only their respective companies’ current MRF projects but also what they factors they considered when designing them.

During the session, each panelist outlined MRF upgrades taking place within their companies. In each case, plans for the upgrade include an increase in processed tonnage.

Rumpke's latest project—a $90 million, 226,000-square-foot facility on a 25-acre site in Columbus, Ohio—will be able to process about 65 tons per hour and 250,000 tons annually once operational in mid-2024, compared with its current Columbus facility, located one-and-a-half miles away from the new site, that processes 40 tons per hour.

"It’ll be the largest in Ohio, probably one of the largest in North America, servicing 44 counties in the state of Ohio," Snyder said. "It’ll have about 250,000 tons a year of capability, which is just mind-blowing when you think about that kind of volume, so upwards of 900 tons a day of recycling that can come to this facility."

While Rumpke operates 12 recycling centers and 25 transfer stations in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana, Casella oversees 18 MRFs in the northeastern U.S. and is in the process of upgrading a facility in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Nearing the end of a 20-week shutdown to perform the upgrades, Cappadona said the MRF is among the largest in the country and will soon be able to process 200,000 tons of recyclables per year or 50 tons per hour. The facility previously had a processing capacity of 40 tons per hour.

Recology services 127 communities throughout California, Oregon, Washington and Nevada, and is in the process of fully renovating its Santa Rosa, California, MRF to increase its capacity from 10-20 tons per hour to 50 tons per hour. Farewell expects the project to be complete before the end of this year.

LRS, which operates facilities across 10 states in the Midwest and South, recently completed a renovation at its 25-ton-per-hour MRF in Chicago, which was designed for a future expansion of up to 35 tons per hour.

"As we all know, when you build the [new] system, you immediately need more capacity," Molitor said. "On the front end, we designed [the Chicago facility] for a 35-ton-an-hour option. We’re currently going with 25, but if we decide to, we can add a little more equipment and bump it up to 35."

To increase the amount of material that can be recycled, each MRF project highlighted during the session is deploying modern machinery. In addition to raising capacity, employee safety was considered for the upgrades.

When it comes to equipment, the number of optical sorters in use at the aforementioned MRFs increased while screens decreased. Full equipment redundancy also was a point of emphasis, with each facility housing multiple sort lines and balers.

Rumpke's new Columbus MRF will include a 32,000-square-foot tipping floor and a commercial recycling area. It also will use trommel technology at the beginning of the system to size material before it reaches one of four presort lines that are designed to lower burden depth and make it easier for employees to remove contaminants.

A modern twist will be the use of 19 optical sorters, followed by ballistic separators. A dual container line will allow the facility to sort out multiple grades of plastic and make thermoforms recyclable for Rumpke customers in the region.

"We’re very excited to be able to add more commodities as we move forward," Snyder said.

Snyder added that the MRF will feature a single old corrugated container (OCC) screen, "and that's it."

"We don't have polishing screens, we don't have to deal with rubber stars anymore," he said. "We’re not dealing with getting in screens and cleaning them out and all that stuff."

Farewell said his facility in California, which Recology acquired in 2017, is outdated and undersized, using technology developed in 1990s. As a result, it has only been able to process about 50 percent of its daily volume, and the aging equipment has led to frequent downtime and increasing operating expenses.

"We have the cost of third-party processing and the additional trucking," Farewell said. "We have increased disposal as a result of low recovery, so we have higher residuals. And then we have extensive maintenance costs.

"The other thing we’re missing out on is revenue," he added. "All the material we have to have sent out to third parties to process, we have to forgo all of that sales revenue. That's another reason we needed to make [the facility upgrade] happen. Other times, we’re not able to take advantage of higher commodity prices due to our low volume. We have to turn away volume just due to a lack of capacity."

Farewell said the goal of the renovation is to maximize uptime, recovery, efficiency, quality and worker safety while minimizing operational and maintenance expenses. He added that he expects the updated MRF to reach a 95 percent recovery rate along with its increase in capacity.

The facility will have two infeed lines, both outfitted with OCC separators and a total of seven optical sorters—three focused on cleaning fibers and four on the container line. Three ballistic separators also will help manage the system's tonnage.

LRS’ Chicago facility spans 140,000 square feet and sits on 10 acres. It houses a single-stream system and transfer station and includes an option for construction and demolition processing. The upgraded recycling system features six optical sorters—three sorting fiber and three sorting containers—and an auger screen that sizes material before it reaches the presort line.

The changes also have created a safer environment for employees, Molitor said. "It's not a traditional presort line anymore; we don't have people digging through piles of material, so the burden depth is lower, which allows for two presort staff, mitigating the safety and risk. We’ve found this very beneficial in the months since we’ve been open."

Casella's Charlestown MRF will house two lines for fiber sorting and separation that will move out to one back-end container line. It also will have six optical sorters, all for cleaning fiber, and three more on the back end to sort what Cappadona called "traditional containers."

Much like Rumpke's Columbus MRF, Cappadona said the Charlestown renovation will cut down on screen usage, using just two.

"Screening is starting to go away," he said.

The facility will have two ballistic separators for removing fiber from container streams, as well as points throughout the system designed to extract contaminants, such as films, from the stream. Toward the back end of the system, the facility will be equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) with the capability to show the product mix anywhere in the system.

"AI seems to be a must these days when you’re designing a new facility," Cappadona said. "The vision system will allow us to make adjustments [to] the system for what's being extracted and what's not being extracted. Reporting on a minute-by-minute basis is very important when you’re operating a system."

Brooks highlighted a facility BHS recently built in Alberta, Canada, that began operations in late March. The company processes 25 metric tons per hour of residential waste and has three screens processing OCC and other paper grades. The facility also has three optical sorters—two coupled with AI to process fiber—and one serving an autonomous container line.

"What we did is we put all these fundamental building blocks between the opticals, between AI, between robotics, as well as the controls, and we put it into a system that, now—with one optical [sorter] and quality control on the back end—can process five different commodities," Brooks said.

The facility has hit recovery rates of over 90 percent, processing polyethylene terephthalate, natural high-density polyethylene (HDPE), colored HDPE, polypropylene and aluminum. "With that system, we’re able to hit all the ISRI [Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries] specs for purity and hit recovery numbers in the high 90s on a system processing 25 tons an hour inbound over roughly a 10-hour shift," Brooks said. "The plant's been hitting 95 percent uptime most days."

While zero-labor MRFs are not a reality for most operators, it is becoming increasingly desirable as a means to limit safety risks for employees.

Reducing screen usage is one component. Another is automation throughout the system.

Once operational, Rumpke's sprawling Columbus facility will staff 12 people—all on the presort line.

"They’ll be pulling out contaminants, pulling out those types of things that are going to cause us issues on the presort," Snyder said. "The back half of the MRF, the container side of the facility, will be 100 percent automated."

The plant will use near-infrared (NIR) optical scanners along with AI that will provide data on the material stream.

"We’re doing away with the 2D, 3D separation screens," he said. "They’re a safety issue at our facilities with employees having to get into the screens six [to] seven times in a 24-hour period, cleaning out shrink wrap and bags and those types of things. When I had an opportunity to do something different, I did.

"There are manufacturers that make anti-wrapping screens, and I think those can be successful, as well," he added. "But when you have the technology of using AI along with NIR optical sorters that can mingle with ballistic separators, I’m not [going to use screens]. I understand there's maintenance to everything, but to keep our employees safer and to keep uptime higher, we’re going to do away with screens."

Cappadona said Casella distinguishes its labor as direct and indirect. "When you think about direct, those are the people physically touching material," he said. "Indirect is the people operating the equipment, whether it's a loader or a skid steer or something of that sort."

He added that any time safety, productivity and quality can be improved, in that order, it's a benefit that should be considered when redesigning a system. For example, he said, for safety reasons, "[There should be] no wrapping. We don't have folks climbing on screens, cutting out film."

MRF investments aren't just about the present; they’re also about the future, according to the panel.

They advocated for leaving empty space in the facility where new equipment could be set up later on, as well as additional storage space.

"One of the things that was important when we designed this MRF is we designed it for the future," Snyder said of the new Columbus location. "We actually put extra bunker space in here; we put extra baler capacity in here because as we continue to grow, and, as the stream continues to change, we want to be able to make changes with it."

With regard to space, he said material can be difficult to add without bunkers to store it in. "Just because something's recyclable, on the back side, it doesn't mean it's recycled if it can't run through your facility," he said. "Leaving space and leaving the ability to change in the future as the stream changes [is important]."

Brooks added that it is important to track data on the composition of incoming material to make future decisions.

"You’ve got to have the infrastructure, you’ve got to have the technology and you’ve also got to have some way of making those decisions," Brooks said. "The data piece to all that is going to be incredibly important. If you’re designing for a composition you have today, you’re already too late.

"You’ve got to have some kind of window into the data of what you have coming in," he said. "Some of that is hand sorting, but there are other technologies coming along now where you can have that back so the adoption isn't just, ‘OK, I’m not just getting a new piece of equipment in, but how do I optimize what I have today for the tonnage that's coming?’ That's a big piece as that evolves forward."