Heartland Recycling Center LRS

STEPS

Recycling Process

At the start of the sorting process, the materials pass through a scraping drum. The main idea behind placing this back scrapping drum is to have a constant flow of materials. Materials then go through the Old Corrugated Containers (OCC) screen. The OCC Screen removes most of the big pieces of cardboard straight from the sorting process. These sorted pieces then directly go through to the OCC belt to the balers where they are bundled together. 

From there, the remaining materials goes through the “News Screen”. In this phase the plastic containers (bottles and cans) are separated from the papers (fiber). The paper moves on the top of the screen and the containers fall through and move forward in the process. In the next phase the materials pass through the ballistic separator where the two dimensional (paper, cardboard) and three-dimensional materials (bottles, cans) are separated. The fiber moves upward, and the containers falls downward. There are manual sorters in the next step to ensure that the materials moving ahead are efficiently sorted. Any plastic container or cans are removed from the paper line and vice-versa. Then the plastic container (tin and aluminum cans) lines move ahead and pass through the optical sorter which is mainly crafted to separate PET (water bottles) by optically scanning the materials.  Then the container materials move through the SamurAI robot where the plastic materials are separated by colors. There are several benefits associated with this AI Robot, including reduced workforce and managing cost, approx. 64 picks per minute, almost twice the average pick rate of labor and efficient sorting performance.  Then the remaining containers pass through the Eddy current separator where the aluminum cans and non-ferrous materials are separated. In this stage, with the help of number of magnets, electromagnetic fields are produced and rotates fast and removes non-ferrous items. After this all the trash (residue) are removed from the process. 

There are four Balers: Two Ram Balers that bundle and pack everything other than cardboard coming from tipping floor. One is closed door baler that packs clear film plastic, and the fourth baler is called the American Baler that bales all OCC.