Balers: The heart of a MRF

During the 2025 MRF Operations Forum, which took place in Chicago last October, a panel of material recovery facility (MRF) design experts discussed how balers interact with sorting equipment and bunkers and how a MRF’s overall design affects efficiency.

Factors such as the size of the facility, budget and desire for baler redundancy affect an operator’s decision when it comes to selecting the right baler or balers for the site. In the design phase, evaluating a MRF’s needs can ensure it has baling equipment capable of meeting those requirements.

“The balers are the heart of the plant,” said Adam Lovewell, process engineer for the Midwest territory at Connecticut-based Van Dyk Recycling Solutions. “Without a baler, you’re not processing. So, if the baler is not able to keep up with the amount of material that you’re processing, that just restricts your throughput right off the bat.”

It is essential to have a baler that can keep up with the volume of material a MRF processes, he continued, and that starts with critically evaluating balers in the site’s design phase.

David Marcouiller, executive vice president of sales engineering at Quebec-based Machinex, said running a time and movement analysis helps determine a facility’s design as that information is important to understanding what’s possible for the MRF.

“If you start [designing a MRF] from scratch, there’s so much that comes into play, like the size of the balers [and] the capacity of each bunker,” he said.

Thomas Brooks, chief technology officer at Eugene, Oregon-based Bulk Handling Systems (BHS), also noted the perks of such an analysis in the design phase, saying it can allow a facility to determine its bale management and baling schedules.

MRF size and baler redundancy

A MRF often is sized based on expected capacity, but there also is a timing aspect, Brooks said, noting the importance of a timing analysis.

“You have to think about the baler and the bunkers as a combined system,” he said. “As you’re looking at how you’re building in redundancy, that doesn’t always mean you have to have an extra baler sitting there waiting to go. What that means is you have to have capacity so the plant can run while you’re maintaining that piece of equipment.”

Bill Weeden, the assistant manager of electrical engineering at San Diego-based CP Group, said designing for capacity is all about being able to handle the throughput.

“In a perfect world, redundancy is great,” he said. “You have two or three balers, that’s great, but, unfortunately, [with] maintenance issues or whatever, something’s going to go down, and you obviously don’t want to stop the infeed at that point.”

David Cain, a project director for Stadler America LLC of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, also said he prefers to have baler redundancy to ensure any breakdowns can be worked around.

“Having that flexibility and having the bunkers provide that stop gap so you’re not stopping a process if your baler goes down” are valuable for avoiding downtime, he continued. “So, if you’re building in some redundancy, it’s always extremely helpful.”

Brooks added that some material streams are better suited to being fed directly to a dedicated baler, while others are better batch-fed to any of a MRF’s balers from the bunker.

“In a lot of facilities, we’ll do direct-bale for most of our fiber content because that’s a constant,” he continued. “If that’s not a constant flow, then there’s other problems that we’ve got to get resolved.”

Having the ability to batch feed for plastics or containers is an asset because their volumes could be lower and doing so ensures you’re not making partial bales, Brooks continued.

While he isn’t opposed to using a dedicated baler for certain materials, MRFs could be stuck if the baler goes down, Marcouiller said.

Lovewell said his stance revolves around avoiding single points of failure, explaining that if a highly automated MRF with baler redundancy wants to recover and bale another product, the retrofit must avoid creating such a situation.

“You need to work through on the design portion of whatever equipment you add to recover that product,” he said. “If it’s a dedicated baler, you need to be able to bypass that because [if] that one baler goes down ... your whole plant is down as a result.”

Embracing automation

To limit the need for human interaction with the baler, Weeden suggested using a gateway device and Ethernet connection to remotely select the commodity being baled. “If your operator says, ‘I’m going to bale old corrugated containers [OCC],’ and they start unloading the OCC bunker, the baler could have already changed its recipe to OCC automatically.”

Automating operations using sensors and a gateway can lend efficiency to baling operations, Weeden said.

“The person operating [the baler] needs to be able to pivot in five different directions because they have no idea what’s about to happen,” he added.

Cain said balers are “their own animal,” but it’s possible to increase baling efficiency by knowing the weight and volume of material in the bunkers.

Another automation tip Marcouiller recommended is centralizing control operations because controlling the bunkers and balers via one human machine interface, or HMI, eliminates the need for an operator to run from place to place.

Other suggestions from the panel included installing a closed-circuit television monitoring system. Marcouiller said adding one is simple and allows operators to remotely track operations rather than having to visit each piece of equipment.

“Or just [install] a good ol’ bubble mirror … where you operate and run balers,” he said of other monitoring options.

Tracking productivity

To track metrics such as bale count, Marcouiller uses the supervisory control and data acquisition, or SCADA, system. He said this allows the MRF to track throughput throughout the day.

Brooks said the number of bales a MRF produces is a critical key performance indicator for both BHS and the company’s customers.

“A baler from a data perspective is not grossly sophisticated,” he said. But given all the other sensors and technology in a MRF, “We’re getting closer and closer to this chain of custody aspect, from when [the material] walks through the door to when it ends up in the bale.”

Lovewell said the balers Van Dyk provides are equipped with reporting, allowing a MRF to know how many bales of each commodity are produced each day. The balers also track how much wire and electricity they use.

He said the balers automatically generate these reports and send the information by email to a set distribution list, providing insights that allow operators to assess the machines’ performance.

“If you understand that the target for the day is 150 bales of fiber combined between paper and OCC, you know that you’re meeting your goals for your shift when you can track that it did 150 bales,” Lovewell said.

He highlighted one of Van Dyk’s partners, London-based GreyParrot, which offers an image recognition product using artificial intelligence (AI), saying many MRFs now use the technology to monitor what goes on within the plant.

“It will tell you if an aluminum can is going up your infeed conveyor, it’ll tell you where that aluminum can ends up in the plant,” Lovewell said, adding that using this technology to monitor and analyze material allows an operator to know exactly what goes into the bales. “We added more automation, but you really need even more automation to keep the automation you added in check.”

Using system data

With the advanced technology deployed in MRFs now providing a range of information, it poses the question: How do MRFs best use this data?

According to Brooks, this data can provide insights into the physical products a MRF is producing and indicate how efficiently a MRF’s operations are producing those products.

“Those bales don’t just show up. … There’s a whole system that went behind that,” he said.

Leveraging the data from all the facets of a MRF can help operators understand what’s going on in the front part of their systems all the way through to the balers, Brooks added.

Cain said while he doesn’t believe AI will change the way facilities are designed or laid out, it will improve MRF operators’ ability to capture data, modify their operations and operate with flexibility.

The author is assistant editor at the Recycling Today Media Group and can be reached at atrevarthan@gie.net.