SIMS NYC RHRF
OVERVIEW
RHRF Background
The Sims Material Recovery Facility in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, New York is the largest of its kind in the US and can process about 1,000 tons of recyclables every day. It has been operating since late 2013. Tasked with handling most of the metal, glass, and plastic gathered through New York City’s dual-bin program, plus a share of the paper fiber, the facility sits at the heart of the city’s recycling effort. The facility was built at a cost of $115 million, from a public-private partnership between the city and Sims Municipal Recycling. The facility’s 850-foot dock space is located at a pier on Brooklyn’s waterfront, allowing materials to be transported in and out using barges instead of trucks, while freight rail connections are used for outbound shipment of baled commodities like glass and metals. The RHRF has 16 Auto sort 4 optical sorters from Tomra, SSI Shredding system, ballistic separation units from Stadler and balers from Harris. Currently under a 20-year contract with the New York City Department of Sanitation (DSNY), Sims runs the site. Each month, DSNY sends the facility more than 24,000 tons of plastic, glass and metal to be sorted; Sims also handles about half of the city’s paper fiber stream, marketing it after recovery.
VIEW
Location
STEPS
Recycling Process
The recycling process at the facility starts with receiving materials. The materials arrive in plastic bags that are clear because of New York City’s compact urban landscape, which makes it difficult to use large bins sealed with lids. The bags are then tipped onto a reception floor, where a front-end loader moves them into the system’s intake. The recyclables are split into two identical infeed belts, so if one breaks down, the facility will run on the other. The first major equipment, known as the “Liberator,” is a low-speed shredder that rips open the plastic bags without destroying their contents. The shredded bags and contents then cascade down to a conveyor system for additional processing. Plastic bags are then sorted and baled, but uneven market demand usually means these bales must be handled as waste.
At this stage, the mixed recyclables travel along about two and a half miles of round-the-clock conveyor belts for five days a week with two shifts dedicated to maintenance and cleaning. Mechanized sorting is largely carried out using several technologies aimed at sorting by physical and chemical properties. Glass is the first material to be separated from the stream. This is done with rotating disc screens—metal rods that rotate to permit heavy, small objects such as glass to drop through as light or bigger material continues. These dropped shards of glass are picked up on a second conveyor and sent to a designated glass processing center.
After removing the glass, the materials pass through a large spinning drum magnet. The drum magnet helps in picking up ferrous materials. A magnetic separator removes ferrous materials like steel and tin from the glass. A reverse magnetic field eddy current separator is then utilized to expel non-ferrous metals like aluminum. Later, plastics are sorted with a mix of ballistic separation and optical scanning. The ballistic separator sorts out two-dimensional objects like paper, which rise to the top, from three-dimensional objects like plastic containers, which move down. This process successfully sorts materials based on shape and weight. The optical sorting stage uses near-infrared (NIR) technology to scan the chemical composition of passing objects. Once a particular material is identified, pressurized air jets are activated to redirect the material to the proper stream. Such optical scanners perform at about 90–95% accuracy. Plastics pass through an optical sorting unit, which segregates plastics by different grades such as PET, PP, natural/colored HDPE and cartons. Paper is further segregated by dedicated optical sorters. Finally, as a final quality assurance step, manual sorters are located at the termination of the sorting line to manually pick out any contaminants, thus improving the overall quality of the outgoing bales. After being sorted, items are held in designated bunkers until the corresponding stream is full. Then the contents are dumped and transported to balers, where they are pressed into tight, identical bales. The bales are separated by material type and then shipped to downstream processors.
