A group of companies that seeks to extract additional value from auto shredder fluff has decided to build a processing site in Fond Du Lac, Wis.
The companies involved in the project include Green EnviroTech Corp. (Fond Du Lac); the German company SiCon GmbH, which will use its system to process the material; Sadoff Iron & Metal Co. (Fond Du Lac), a local scrap recycler that will supply shredder fluff to the facility; and Plas2fuel (Tigard, Ore.).
Green EnviroTech Corp.’s.(GET) recycling process begins with ASR (auto shredder residue). The residue is separated into four streams of material: mixed plastics, rubber, metals and all other non-specific remaining materials. The automated separation of shredder residue is a mechanical process developed by GET’s strategic partner, SiCon Gmbh.
Plans call for the project to handle as much as 100,000 tons of ASR per year.
In an article by Recycling Today last year, Heiner Guschall, SiCon’s managing director, noted that the company has three VW-SiCon systems operating in Europe with a total capacity of 200,000 tons per year. "A fourth plant is currently under construction in Slovakia, and a fifth plant will be started up in the second quarter of 2010," he says, noting that three additional plants are in the engineering phase.
SiCon’s VW-SiCon system can recover 80 percent of the ASR, Guschall says. "It is a key feature of our process that we produce products which are marketable and which have a positive value."
The concept will have multiple steps, including extracting both ferrous and nonferrous metals from the ASR at the front end. From there, the fluff will be separated into three piles: plastics, fiber and sand. The plastics will be processed, with some material going back into the manufacturing of other plastic products, while another portion will go toward the production of synthetic fuels. The fiber and sand will be sent to a landfill.
Using a technology it calls Plasti-Stract, GET processes the plastic/rubber stream. With this technology, GET removes any contaminants from the plastics using a single-step process, including a combination of two liquefied gases under pressure.
Once cleaned of contaminants, the plastic separation process begins. The mix of plastic and rubber is separated into three streams polypropylene/polyethylene, ABS/high impact polystyrene and mixed plastics and rubber using ‘sink float’ technology developed by SiCon. During this step, each plastic type to be recovered and recycled is separated into its own “family” of plastic. The separated streams are then sent through a metal detector and sent into a rail car or bulk truck ready for market.
The remaining mix of resins and rubber will then be sent to Plas2Fuel, which will use a process that will convert the mix to synthetic oil. The process converts 8 pounds of the mix to one gallon of synthetic oil.
GET’s process does not use any water in the process, so the plant will not generate any effluent.
Norb Geiss, the U.S. representative for SiCon, says that while the company’s system has been used throughout Europe, this is the first installation of its kind in the United States. The hope is that once the system is in operation, other auto shredders will see the value of the project and will seek to install similar systems near their auto shredders.
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