A new big top has opened in the Florida panhandle, but instead of housing animals and circus performers, the building holds the latest in advanced single-stream sortation equipment.
The Emerald Coast Utilities Authority (ECUA) recently opened a new 25-tons-per-hour single-stream MRF in Pensacola, Fla. The facility was designed, manufactured and installed by Eugene, Ore.-based Bulk Handling Systems.
Expected to sort 40,000 tons per year, the $10.6 million MRF aims to recover 95 percent of incoming recyclable materials.
“Because resources are limited, our company’s focus is capturing value that might otherwise be lost,” Ted Pierpont, BHS director of sales, stated in a press release.
The line is housed in a tent-like structure that provides a clear span 162 feet wide and 54 feet tall. The structure cost about $500,000 less than a 35-foot-tall steel building would have cost, said Nathalie Bowers, ECUA spokeswoman.
Feedstock comes from nearly 100,000 customers in two counties, Escambia and Santa Rosa. At the heart of the sortation line are BHS screening and NRT optical sortation technologies. The NRT optical sorter ejects PET containers upward and mixed plastics downward, while allowing residue to feed into a default, middle bin, said Peter Raschio, BHS marketing manager. HDPE is hand-picked before the optical sorter.
The line also includes an eddy-current separator targeting aluminum, a Nihot glass cleanup system to remove contaminants from the recovered glass stream — NRT and Nihot are both BHS companies — and BHS’ Metering Bin Liberator Class, which is equipped with bag-ripping teeth to open bags and ease downstream separation.
