News

Jul 10, 2023

You’ve gotta keep it separated: Eriez

Jonathan Schulberg of Eriez Australia discusses how the company’s sorting

Jonathan Schulberg of Eriez Australia discusses how the company's sorting equipment can make resource recovery more effective and economical.

As the demand for recycled and recyclable products surges across the globe, so too does the need for uncontaminated streams of recycled material.

For circular solutions to be financially viable, manufacturers of recycled products rely on supplies of feedstock that are of a consistently high standard.

Sorting and separating metal from waste streams is also critical in the growing waste-to-energy and tyre recycling industries, where the recovery of fine metal contaminants is of economic and environmental importance.

Getting the value out

Jonathan Schulberg, head of Resource Recovery and Recycling Business Development at Eriez Australia, says the company provides sorting and processing solutions for a wide range of industries – but recycling is where things get interesting.

"Often, a piece of equipment is pigeonholed into one particular industry," he says. "But recycling as an industry is so broad, and it covers a wide range of product streams. How you combat contamination in those product streams is where we come in."

Eriez offers a range of ferrous and nonferrous separation equipment for materials recovery facilities (MRF) and municipal solid waste (MSW) facilities, including dynamic drum separators, suspended magnets, and eddy current separators.

Jonathan says Eriez's eddy current separators are among the company's best-selling equipment, largely because they play a role in almost every aspect of recycling.

"You’ll see them in MRF plants to remove aluminium and the like from product lines such as paper, plastic and cardboard," he says.

"They’re also widely used in the scrap metal industry as a revenue generator."

In an MRF context, he says, capturing aluminium cans, ring-pulls and bottle-caps makes for a valuable revenue stream, but it's also key to avoiding issues in downstream equipment.

"If you have paper or cardboard going to a baling machine, having a piece of aluminium in that creates contamination, which lessens the value of that product. But it can cause damage to that equipment as well, which is even more costly.

"That aluminium, as soon as it's recovered, is instantly sellable. That makes an eddy current separator very easy to quantify from a dollars and cents point of view, and it's also very easy to prove its reliability and feasibility in a process."

Dynamic innovation

Eriez has recently introduced the Dynamic Pulley Separator, a high-strength ferrous separator designed to remove trapped steel and weak magnetic fines from recycled materials.

Placed before an eddy current separator in a recycling line, the Dynamic Pulley Separator helps improve metal separation and recovery in downstream equipment, while reducing wear or damage on those machines.

"It's designed for reprocessing very fine ferrous metals, which otherwise generally get missed in applications such as bottom ash processing in waste-to-energy production," Jonathan says.

"It's also great for businesses in the scrap metal industry, where they’re wanting to extract every piece of valuable metal from their waste streams – material that is otherwise put on a truck and goes to landfill. That is literally throwing money into the ground."

Existing equipment for capturing ferrous metals, such as suspended magnets and drum magnets, work to a point, Jonathan says. But technological limitations mean some of the smaller stuff will always get through.

"The smaller material often gets embedded into what's around it, whether it's dirt, plastic, foam or rubber. It's very hard to remove because it's of a lesser density than the thing it's stuck in," he says.

"Having a product like this, that can agitate and work that material free and remove it from the product stream, is very advantageous.

"There's been a positive response from the industry too, especially in the scrap metal space. In part, I think, because there's been very little in the way of major product development in ferrous separation for some time."

Jonathan sees potential for the Dynamic Pulley Separator in Australia's tyre recycling industry, where he says minimising contamination in recovered material can be a challenge.

"There are a lot of fantastic companies repurposing tyres for playground surfaces, road bases and other construction applications but there are issues in being able to maintain purity in the material and removing that ferrous metal contamination. That's where we can assist."

Jonathan says the Dynamic Pulley Separator's unobtrusive footprint – they are available in one-metre and 1.5-metre conveyor set-ups – means it can easily be incorporated into any existing treatment plant.

This is an element of Eriez's service that the company takes seriously – regardless of what they’re supplying and to which industry.

Whenever Eriez is in talks with a prospective customer, the company always prefers to arrange a site visit to ensure the product will fit the purpose.

"To truly understand what you’re working with, you’ve got to be on-site," Jonathan says. "Then you can get a real sense of how a plant operates, the pitfalls in the process. These things can be quite difficult to explain in an email or with photos.

"It also builds better communication between yourself and the customer. When you’re explaining how the product is going to work, you’re both visualising the same thing.

"It's a must-have for any product that we sell, and that's why we’ve never sold any of our products online. Because if you don't develop that understanding, nine times out of ten, someone's going to buy the wrong thing."

Supplying the future

Jonathan says that with how fast Australia's recycling and resource recovery streams are changing, trying to think years or even decades into the future is standard practice for the industry.

"The waste streams that many Australian plants are seeing now are completely different to what they were seeing a decade ago, both in terms of volume and how they’re separated," he says.

"There's no point in supplying something that fixes the problem you have right now if it's going to be obsolete in five years. There's a lot of forward-thinking that goes into the supply of equipment."

For more information, visit: www.eriez.com.au

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