Boulder County, Colo., Upgrades MRF with Machinex Optical Sorters

Boulder County, Colo., recently upgraded its material recovery facility (MRF) with optical sorters from Machinex Technologies Inc. This upgraded system has been processing material since the end of August, but the MRF held its official ribbon-cutting ceremony this week.

“We are pleased with the superb performance of Machinex and its subcontractors with regard to the recent MRF processing system upgrades,” said Rick Kattar, recycling operations analyst at Boulder County, in a statement. “It is with great pride that we accomplished the retrofit upgrades with little operational disruption and a keen awareness of the importance of working in partnership to achieve our goals. Machinex worked diligently to maintain a transparent action plan that always engaged the county and its operator, EcoCycle, throughout the duration of the project. The county has been especially pleased with the customer-centric approach Machinex has employed to assure our clear understanding of the challenges, as well as ready solutions if required.”

The facility, which processes 25 tons of material per hour, receives more than 45,000 tons of recyclables from single stream collection per year. The county decided to modernize is container line to maximize recovery on plastics and decrease manual sorting.

In order to meet the county’s needs, Machinex has added two MACH Hyspec Optical Sorters to the MRF. The first one ejects PET and PP, while the second one ejects HDPE and mixed plastics. A Machinex Eddy Current was also installed upstream of the optical sorters to sort aluminum cans.

“There are multiple equipment manufacturers in this plant so this is another example that Machinex is not afraid, and is always ready, to perform major retrofits or upgrade existing systems that don’t have Machinex equipment in the first place,” said Chris Hawn, executive vice president of sales  and business development at Machinex.