Machinex and RDT build MRF in Australia

Machinex, Plessisville, Quebec, in collaboration with Recycling Design & Technologies (RTD), its partner and distributor in Oceania, has supplied its first complete system in Australia. The system at a new material recovery facility (MRF) in Townsville in the North Queensland region of Australia has been in operation since early summer.

The new Townsville MRF was built and is being operated by Re.Group, an Australian company that specializes in recovering and recycling resources from waste. In July 2016, Townsville City Council awarded Re.Group a contract to process around 15,000 tons annually of its curbside collected recyclables for at least the next eight years.

Sydney-based Re.Group says its mission is to design, build, operate and optimize infrastructure that enables the maximum amount of waste to be diverted from disposal and positively reused as a renewable resource. Re.Group has facilities in Queensland, New South Wales, and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), which includes Canberra, Australia’s capital, and is involved in processing all urban waste streams, including traditional curbside “yellow bin” recyclables, as well as composting food and garden organics from “green bin” services and recovering resources from household mixed waste streams.

“We are very proud of this new facility that will provide world-class recycling services for the people of North Queensland,” says Re.Group Managing Director David Singh.

RDT, which is the engineering arm of Re.Group, is based in Queensland and works with leading equipment suppliers from around the world to select the best technology for each recycling project.

Pierre Paré, CEO of Machinex, says, “We have been supplying sorting equipment to RDT since 2010. Over the years, our partnership has solidified, and we are very proud to see the very first, complete Machinex system in Australia in operation today.”

The single-stream system, which process 15 tons of recyclables per hour, incorporates some of the most recent sorting technologies from Machinex, such as different types of discs screens to sort cardboard, newspaper and mixed paper; a ballistic separator to finish the separation of the containers and the mixed paper; magnetic separators to remove ferrous and nonferrous metals; and an optical sorter to separate plastics grades.

A glass processing circuit uses Krysteline implosion technology to turn bottles into sand. This “glass sand” can replace virgin sand in bulk markets, such as road construction and concreting works. Re.Group has installed a drying unit at Townsville that destroys residual sugars and odors on glass and allows the glass sand product to be used in higher-value markets, such as sandblasting and pool filtration.