J&B News & Updates

20.07.22 | Business News

In 2022, we began work on our Stadler Update to the Recycling Plant at our Windermere Road location. The dry mixed recyclables sorting plant, designed and built by Stadler, has contributed to our continuous improvements to our recycling plant.

“We continually improve the plant, and our focus is producing the best quality material possible,” says Matt Tyrie, our operations director here at J&B Recycling.

Director at Stadler UK, Benjamin Eule, says “Over the years, the amount of cardboard has significantly increased. Sorting plants are receiving bigger volumes of packaging generated by the growth of online shopping and deliveries. Another change that is having an impact is the switch to different printing techniques in magazines, which makes it more difficult to separate the ink from the fibre. Plastic packaging is also changing, with multilayers, and bottles with different types of sleeves resulting in detection becoming more challenging. Metals have also evolved since we first designed the plant in 2008, with a shift from aluminium to ferrous metal in drinks packaging, and the increasing volumes of coffee capsules which contain aluminium.”

Because of this, sorting plants must have the facilities to process multiple materials flexibly while also delivering the consistently high purity rates demanded by the recycling industry. The designs also need the flexibility to accommodate subsequent upgrades and modifications to meet the changing requirements.

Eule also stated, “The J&B Recycling plant was originally designed to process 12 (metric tons per) hour, with Stadler trommel screens, conveyors and ballistic separator taking care of the mechanical pre-sorting, preparing the material flow for effective downstream processing. Conveyors make sure that the material is sent efficiently to the next sorting process and bunker storage conveyors hold the product before being baled."

In 2017, J&B Recycling and Stadler worked together on a concept to remove paper and aluminum, adding a Tomra Autosort optical sorter and an eddy current separator.

Since then, six additional upgrades have further optimized the plant to meet evolving market demands. The latest upgrade, completed in March, aimed to achieve even higher paper and hardmix purity, and to increase capacity to 18 metric tons per hour.

“The latest upgrade has hit the targets we outlined, to improve quality, reduce labour costs and increase throughput,” says Matt Tyrie. “We have increased the quality of our hard mix grade by adding a laser object detection (LOD) system to the Autosort optical sorter to remove any non fibre contamination. This technology allows each shift to run with reduced labour, and it has allowed the throughput to increase, as the quality of the hard mix was a bottleneck on the plant.

“In all the years we have worked with Stadler, the quality of their product and their ability to hit deadlines on the install stand out,” Matt adds. “We really appreciate the excellent planning of the projects and their ability to turn ideas and drawings into reality.”

A dosing drum feeds the material, which goes through a presort platform for the manual removal of old corrugated containers (OCC) and large film. A Stadler screening drum separates the remaining material into three fractions: fines, midsize and oversize.

The oversize materials, measuring more than 170 millimeters, or 7 inches, go through a quality control cabin and an Autosort to remove mixed paper, cardboard and plastics and produce a News ans Pams fraction.

The midsize fraction, smaller than 17 millimeters, or 7 inches, is separated into fines, 2D and 3D fractions by the Stadler STT2000 ballistic separator. The 2D flat fraction is processed through eddy current separators and Autosort optical sorter before a final quality control check to produce two streams: mixed paper and metals. The 3D rolling fractions follow a similar process, which begins with and overband magnet, to produce mixed plastic, high-density polyethylene and polyethylene terephthalate fractions. Fines are being processed to remove contaminants to create a glass product. All the output fractions, with the exception of glass, are baled and sold, according to Stalder.