Behind The Scenes
22 September 2014
Go behind the scenes at our state-of-the-art material recovery facility in this video with our State Resource Development Manager Jake Hickey.
Watch as a go-pro camera makes its way through our recycling plant, while Jake explains how the facility has helped us improve the diversion rate of waste away from landfill – from 70% to 80-90% plus!
See the full transcription below.
Hello. Glad to introduce you to Instant Waste Management’s resource recovery solution.
We’ve recently invested heavily in a new state-of-the-art facility that enables us to recycle very high levels of the co-mingled waste collected from construction and demolition sites across the state. One of the things we’re very pleased about here is the synchronicity of the system, enabling everything to move fluidly through the line and basically batch load large quantities of waste through and recycle pure quality materials out the other end.
I’m going to talk you though the process behind this briefly now. Basically material coming through the apron feeder will be going through a primary screen that will sieve out anything that is smaller than 250 millimetres and divert it through drum magnets to extract the metal. Anything over 250 millimetres in size is sent over to a shredder that basically chews it up and chews it to smaller than 200 millimetre in size chunks, also extracting the metal out in the process using a giant rotating electromagnet.
Then it runs through a sand oscillating screen which brings it down to less than two to three millimetres in a giant sieve. This basically removes all the organic impurities that are in the sand leaving it with a lovely recycled colour that’s recognisably easier to use in construction and also has stronger properties when you compact it correctly.
Then the product is then fired through air knives on a conveyor line that’s probably around half a kilometre long, one of the largest systems of construction and demolition in the state and in the country. Those air knives effectively remove plastic and paper and cardboard that would have been destined to go to landfill. That gets segregated off, compacted, and then stored to be recycled by others.
In turn, we use the flotation tank that goes through the next stream in the process to separate the wood. Anything that is heavier like Jarrah or hard woods will need to be picked off the line and we have hand pickers before and after the flotation tank to look for any impurities that might be in the products that we are recycling. The wood is then processed off to a recycling facility and turned into compost.
So we have metal that’s turned into reinforcement, wood that gets turned into composting materials and mulch, sand that gets turned into clean fill recycled sand and lights that are separated off and can be sent off to the waste to gas industry. Finally, we have a crushed aggregate mix made up of concrete and clay.
In summary, we’re hoping to achieve higher levels of recycling. In the past we’ve won awards for a 70% recycling and diversion rate away from land fill. This new facility will be able to handle more volume, operate for shorter time periods and easily achieve marks around the 80%-90% mark, with the end goal in the long term future being zero landfill.
Now if you want to order your products online from Instant Waste Management just go to www.instantwaste.com.au or call through on 9379-2111. We’ll be more than happy to take your order. I look forward to speaking to you and if you have any problem, feel free to call our dedicated customer service centre, which is Western Australia-based. Thank you.