High-Performance Waste Sorting Machines Case Study For Atlanta Based Recycling Company

GreenMine is a leading recycling company serving Georgia and surrounding states. They required a high-throughput system to process mixed plastics and other recyclable streams using advanced equipment.

The Challenge

GreenMine was processing large volumes of post-consumer plastic bales and mixed material streams, and needed a solution featuring effective separation using cutting-edge waste sorting machines. The objective:

• Improve material separation rates

• Increase throughput

• Reduce labour intensive manual sorting tasks

The Solution: Waste Sorting Machines from CRS NI Ltd

CRS NI designed and delivered a bespoke waste sorting system for GreenMine, comprising heavy-duty conveyors, first-stage screen separation units, and a series of high-end optical sorting machines. Among the central components were purpose-built waste sorting machines to handle the separation of different plastics, metals and other materials.
Key features of the solution:

• A steel feeder and shredder to open the plastic bales

• A trommel screen to remove dirt and fines

• Magnetic and eddy current separators to extract metals

• Five optical waste-sorting machines, each dedicated to picking a specific plastic type or colour

At this point the material is now clean & ready for further plastic separation. The material begins its refinement process by passing through a series of 5 high end Optical Sorting machines.  Each machine picks a specific type of plastic and then transfers it to a storage bunker which stores material until ready for baling.

The Unisort Machines take plastic recycling to a new level of sorting and separation for resource recovery by using  sophisticated ways to recover plastics and packaging for re-use,  using hyper-spectral imaging, near-infrared and colour sorting.

The introduction of mechanised picking using state of the art machines replaced the need for large numbers of manual labour to produce the same throughput.

Results & Success

“After extensive research on Suppliers we decided to partner with CRS for an innovative solution. We are now creating valuable materials by refine processing, increasing customer profitability through higher recovery and reducing operational costs”

Adam Glasgow, GreenMine Llc, Atlanta

Sean Conlon, Managing Director of CRS NI Ltd commented “This was an exciting project with a tight deadline which resulted in significantly reducing manual labour and increasing production for GreenMine”