Machinex helps WB Waste & Recycling upgrade sorting capacity

Machinex, headquartered in Plessisville, Quebec, with North American offices in North Carolina, helped WB Waste & Recycling upgrade its Capitol Heights, Maryland, Olive Street Recycling Facility, adding two Mach Ballistic separators and the dual-eject Mach Hyspec optical sorter to eject polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and mixed paper, increasing the facility’s overall material recycling facility performance.

The system processes residential single-stream and commercial materials. The Olive Street material recovery facility was awarded several new contracts for processing additional tons of residential single-stream (RSS) material, so the company needed to improve its recycling capacity to meet these requirements. As a result, it contacted Machinex to retrofit the recycling system.

On the container line, a magnet removes ferrous metals (tin cans), and an eddy current removes the nonferrous items, which are sorted to make a used beverage can- (UBC-) grade aluminum.

As it does in many cases, the Machinex engineering team had to cope with a tight existing building with a low roof to add several pieces of equipment. The result is an increase from 10 tons per hour (TPH) to 25 TPH of sorting capacity.

Dave Taylor, director of recycling at WB Waste and Recycling, says the company experienced six weeks of total downtime while Machinex upgraded its Capitol Heights facility.

“Working with Machinex, with their customer service, it was incredible how quickly we were able to get this project off the ground and completed,” he says.