Cascades Recovery MRF upgrades container sorting line

Plessisville, Quebec-based Machinex has recently installed and started up a container sorting line at Cascades Recovery in Ottawa, Ontario. The dual-stream system, which serves the curbside program for the city of Ottawa, receives approximately 20,600 tons of containers annually. Machinex says the installation features the widest optical sorter on the market to date, a 3.2-meter, or 10 ½-foot, Mach Hyspec.

Cascades Recovery selected Machinex to complete a major retrofit of the MRF’s containers sorting line to obtain higher purity and to increase throughput while using minimal manual sorting. The line’s processing capacity has increased from 7 tons to 15 tons per hour thanks to the modernization. This enabled Cascades Recovery to reduce its operations from two to one shift.

This system features a Mach Ballistic separator to remove plastic bags, a drum magnet to remove steel cans, a Machinex high-capacity II-Ram baler and two Mach Hyspec optical sorters. The first optical unit, which is 3.2 meters, or 10 ½ feet, wide, ejects PET (polyethylene terephthalate) containers upward and gable top and aseptic cartons downward. The second optical unit, at 2.8 meters, or just wider than 9 feet, ejects HDPE (high-density polyethylene) containers upward and mixed plastics downward.

“We decided to integrate an optical sorter larger (3.2 meter) than what is currently offered on the market to process a higher quantity of plastic containers and to allow the MRF operator to increase his volume in the upcoming years,” says Charles-Etienne Simard, project director at Machinex. “This was an exciting challenge for our optical development team and this exclusivity sets us apart from the competition.”

More information on Machinex is available at www.machinextechnologies.com.