New Recycling Plant

• 
• 7th November 2006
• Recycling
 

When Dunmow Skips decided to upgrade their recycling procedures and invest in a more automated, efficient and cost-effective way of treating their inflow of waste raw materials, they turned to screening, crushing and recycling equipment specialists Blue Machinery. Dunmow Skips quickly found that they were in safe hands and, after visiting a number of similar operations where Blue Machinery’s expertise was already well proven, the company placed a significant order for a complete "compact" recycling plant based around Powerscreen equipment, for which Blue Machinery is a distributor.

Father and son team of Steve and Sam Malins are new customers for Blue Machinery and their company Dunmow Skips, of Little Dunmow in Essex, operates a fleet of skips, skip lorries and roll-on-off trucks. Prior to installing their Powerscreen system, the company had been manually sorting incoming waste and this comparatively slow method had led to a backlog of material which was taking up valuable space. It was also apparent that the Malins’ target for increasing saleable product tonnage and reducing tip-to-landfill volumes was falling short of their expectations and the necessity for a fully mechanised system became a priority.

Dale McCrum, area sales manager for Blue Machinery (London), took Steve and Sam Malins to a number of comparable sites to view the type of equipment which might suit Dunmow Skips. Sam Malins commented "We had already been approached by manufacturers of some of the different recycling plants that were available on the market and had decided that Powerscreen kit was by far the best we had seen. It has excellent build quality, is highly productive and its pedigree is impeccable! Also, we quickly built up a firm and friendly relationship with Dale and his company and realised that, in Blue Machinery, we had found a partner we could work well with. Their considerable experience in recycling was of great help to us in making our decision and we are delighted to report that our new plant is working superbly and Blue’s back-up is everything they said it would be!".

Dunmow Skip’s Powerscreen recycling system has been in place for six months now and has transformed the company’s activities. The tip-to-landfill volumes are hugely reduced and exceeding targets, there is now no backlog of material waiting to be treated, valuable stockpile space is freed up for a more effective working area and a rearrangement of the yard layout, while still leaving room for expansion. The daily inflow of skips brings raw waste materials predominantly from building, construction and demolition sites; Dunmow also serves a number of commercial customers from their catchment area. Now, with their new plant, Steve and Sam Malins report that they are saving around 50% of their original operating costs through greatly reducing materials tipped to landfill, producing a significantly greater volume of cleaner secondary aggregates and hardcore for crushing, better quality fines, more saleable wood for pulping and doubling reclaimed tonnages of scrap ferrous and non-ferrous metals for selling on to reprocessors.

The Recycling Plant
The heart of the recycling plant is a Powerscreen Trommel 511 which screens out fines of 20mm down. This has the benefit of producing good quality fines, a more "pickable" product and cleaner and more marketable hardcore and secondary aggregates for crushing. Material above 20mm is transported down a tail conveyor integral to the trommel and onto a main conveyor where a Powerscreen TR Air Separator simply blows the light material into a cage (a major contribution to reduction of landfill volumes). Ferrous separation is carried out by an overband magnet that is installed above the main conveyor just before it enters the picking station.  Here, Blue Machinery has constructed a fully housed two bay picking station where wood waste and other materials are manually recovered from the clean secondary aggregate passing down the conveyor.

Further information:

Karen Wilde,
Blue Machinery Plc.
Tel: 0845 230 4460.
Fax: 0845 658 2314

Associated Links

• Hub-4 Profile of Blue Machinery plc
• Blue Machinery plc Company Website