O.Kay Engineering supply new Automated Recycling Facility for Blakeley’s Waste Management.

Blakeley's Waste Management Ltd is a company with over 25 years’ experience offering waste management and recycling solutions throughout the North West of England. Based in Wigan, in the heart of the North West, their services include the collection and transfer of hazardous, non-hazardous and electrical waste materials.

They recycle over 60% of all the waste they receive in their on-site recycling plant, the rest distributed to specialised treatment facilities; minimising the output sent to landfill sites.

Recently the company made the decision to invest in a brand new automated recycling facility and subsequently contracted the services of O.Kay Engineering, the UK’s leading specialist in design-and-build waste processing plants and material handling systems.
The build commenced in the summer of 2013 and the plant was commissioned in December and currently processes 1,100 tonnes per week.

David Roberts of the HUB went to investigate and talk to the people behind this hugely successful operation.

The plant: at a glance
The highly innovative plant incorporates a Bag Opener, Pre-sort, Trommel, Flip Flop Screen, Air Separator, 3 Electro-magnets, ECS, Ballistic Separator, 5 NIR units, with 45 conveyors and a Baler completing the specification.

The plant: in-depth
Configured by a team of innovative engineers, the Blakeley’s MRF is a ‘white hot’ combination of profit-boosting design requirements and advanced system capability. In every aspect the plant uses latest technologies to reduce operating costs and boost performance.

It begins with an automatic bag opener which receives the mixed incoming materials and passes them out in a metered flow to a pre-sort section which optimises the plant’s downstream operation. Thereafter, a 3m x 11m trommel splits the waste into three streams, from which the fines/organics enter their own dedicated line comprising a flip flop screen and advanced air separation technology.

The larger materials from the trommel are split so the oversize materials are captured for recovery and the midsize pass onto a ballistic separator to split the stream into 2D items (flats) and 3D items (rounds).

This 2D/3D separation is done to boost performance in the next phase of equipment, which is the advanced core of the system. Five of the latest-generation optical sorting units, all with ‘flying beam’ infra-red technology, are set out in a loop formation for the fully automated recovery of office paper, mixed paper, natural film, jazz film, mixed plastics and wood.

The labour-saving across in these five units on a double shift is in the region of £1m per year and they offer consistent recovery and purity - 24/7. With three magnets and an eddy current separator also in the plant, the ferrous and non-ferrous items are recovered to complete the clean-sweep capture of all incoming recyclate streams.

The recyclables fall into their dedicated bays allowing the baler to batch bale them ready for collection by the reprocessor. Any residual material is captured, baled and wrapped and sent to EfW fas RDF. With all the materials separated as products, the 15tph MRF truly offers a zero-to-landfill solution.

A successful partnership
Antonia Kay, Director - O.Kay Engineering, commented, “The MRF is designed to process a mix of C&I and general waste because they have 5,000 customers who don’t all deliver the same material; therefore the plant had to be flexible and very robust to cope with the extreme range of materials. It processes 15tph and, in order to process that range of materials at that volume, we rely heavily on a lot of technology and a big investment therefore by Blakeley’s Waste Management to pick out the recyclates that will then make the plant profitable and of course work for their customers, which is why they use Blakeley’s in the first instance.

Blakeley’s have a very strong in-house engineering capability that they wanted to bring to the development of the MRF and so we worked closely with them sharing technical knowledge in the early stages as the 3D designs were developed.

The limited footprint was an obvious important consideration as we had to get all the technology into the building alongside the storage facilities for the large volume of waste that would be processed. So we had to discuss all compromises that both parties had to develop together which resulted in a plant that worked and was exactly what Blakeley’s required, which is the MRF to process the material at this volume.

The original building that existed had to be extended in length and height to accommodate the 62 x 25 x 8 metre plant which took a lot of engineering ‘know how’ to constantly slim the design down to fit the space available, while keeping the civils cost down and also ensuring that we didn’t compromise the design to the point that the material would choke; we had to be sure the material flowed throughout the plant. Throughout the build and after commissioning O.Kay Engineering will fully support the Blakeley in-house engineering team and maintain the partnership into the future.”

A greater recycling service
Overall the new plant, now fully operational has been a huge success.
Graeme Knight, MD-Blakeley’s, commented, “We had a desire to increase the amount of recycling that we could provide and generate more income from the recyclates and divert more material from landfill. As our original plant was a small, mainly manually operated MRF the new plant utilises up to date technology of near infra-red optical sorting units to increase the rate of recovery of the recyclates.

We were looking for a UK plant builder to help us put together a design that we had and to configure the equipment within the building and O.Kay Engineering were our first choice. This became a partnership in design contributions and the selection of the equipment. We are delighted with the build quality and at the end of the day the waste ends up where it should be in the correct bay – ‘It does what it says on the tin’. This investment has enabled us to provide a greater recycling service to our customers and increase our customer base, so a double return from the new plant.”

Associated Businesses

  • Northamptonshire, NN14 2WD