
Whether sorting plastics for the specific needs of an advanced recycler or separating material inside a more traditional material recovery facility (MRF), Machinex has designed turnkey solutions that meet its customers’ needs while guiding them through every phase of a facility’s development.
Prepping for success
Dustin Olson, CEO of Orlando, Florida-based advanced recycler PureCycle Technologies Inc., is one such customer benefiting from Machinex’s array of proprietary sorting technologies.
PureCycle, which specializes in transforming recovered polypropylene (PP) into what it calls “ultrapure” recycled resin, recently opened its first regional preprocessing facility, or PreP, in Denver, Pennsylvania, utilizing a 100 percent-automated sorting system designed by the Plessisville, Quebec-based equipment manufacturer.
Since commissioning began last October, the 325,000-square-foot PreP facility has been processing approximately 10-12 tons of material per hour and 2.5 million pounds per month, sorting PP, high-density polyethylene (HDPE), polyethylene terephthalate (PET), aluminum, ferrous metals and residuals from bales purchased from MRFs or postindustrial PP plants.
The facility utilizes four MACH Hyspec® optical sorters, two SamurAI® sorting robots equipped with Machinex’s MACH Intell® business intelligence platform, two Machinex II-Ram balers, a magnet, an eddy current and a MACH Trommel that work in concert to increase the purity of PP that PureCycle needs for its advanced recycling process performed at its flagship facility in Ironton, Ohio.

Other commodities, such as HDPE, PET and various metals, are sorted out of the PreP’s material stream and sold to other recyclers on a spot basis.
“[What stands out] is how all the pieces work together in unison to provide the required throughput and quality,” Olson says. “What stood out about Machinex’s offerings was that they listened to what our needs were and made recommendations that would make the facility successful and exceed our expectations.”
The effects of Machinex’s plastic sorting capabilities have been felt immediately at the PreP.
Olson says PureCycle prefers at least 90 percent purity for its PP bales, but often found bales it was purchasing fell below that threshold. With Machinex’s technology, the facility has produced bales of at least 90-95 percent PP for purification.
“The equipment has performed as advertised, meeting its nameplate throughout and producing quality products,” Olson says. “The higher-purity polypropylene bales allow for the company’s Ironton facility to run more efficiently.
“Machinex has been great to work with from design, construction, commissioning and training. We chose Machinex because they provided the most cost-effective solution to what we were looking for. The design, customer service and warranty fell in line with what we needed.”
Thinking big at the MRF

Last August, Rumpke Waste & Recycling opened a 226,000-square-foot MRF in Columbus, Ohio—the largest residential and commercial single-stream facility in North America—featuring a sorting system custom-designed by Machinex.
The 60-tons-per-hour facility features 19 MACH Hyspec® optical sorters, some of which are combined with MACH Vision™ artificial intelligence (AI) technology, and four MACH Ballistic Separators. Through the use of trommels as a front-end solution, the MRF has been able to size material before the presort line, allowing it to cut down on manual sorters.
“I believe Machinex has the best designers for the customer’s needs in the industry,” says Jeff Snyder, Rumpke’s senior vice president of recycling and sustainability. “I think they really keep that in mind and there’s very few things they say they can’t do or at least try to do.”
The MRF has the ability to process up to 250,000 tons of recyclables per year from more than 50 Ohio counties. For plastics sorting, in particular, the facility uses nine MACH Hyspec® opticals and, with the help of AI, can segregate colored bottles and thermoformed plastic containers from clear PET bottles, as well as sort PP and HDPE in natural and mixed-color grades.
Additionally, Snyder says Machinex’s technology has allowed the MRF to process small-format plastics such as vitamin bottles, small PP bottle caps or pet food containers, for example. Overall, the full system has allowed Rumpke to achieve a recovery rate of as high as 99 percent since startup.
While boosting the MRF’s recovery rate, Machinex’s opticals also have allowed Rumpke to process plastics, in particular, without the need for manual sorters. “We have optics cleaning up optics, and sorting is done with all optics on the plastics side,” Snyder says, adding that an additional optical situated at the end of the container line is able to spot plastics that were missed on the first pass-through and send them back through the system.
From the beginning of the MRF project to its opening, Machinex worked with Rumpke’s general contractor and architecture firm to ensure the system fit the recycler’s exact specifications.
“It’s more than just showing up with equipment and installing equipment,” Snyder says. “There’s so much more when you’re thinking about electricity and air and you think about the integration within our IT systems and just being able to understand how [the system] is going to fit inside the building with our general contractor. That integration was critical to me. It was extremely important to make this project a success.
“I think the integration Machinex brings, the expertise that they bring, the technology they bring, is [the best] bar none. They do everything from balers to AI to sortation to trommels. You name it, they do it all. It’s nice to have a turnkey equipment provider that does it from start to finish.”

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