In the mix

In recent years, Rumpke Waste & Recycling added polypropylene (PP) tubs and cups to its recycling stream. As the company’s Senior Vice President of Recycling and Sustainability, Jeff Snyder was designing its new $100 million material recovery facility (MRF) in Columbus, Ohio, and he had his eye on adding clamshell plastic containers to the plastic commodities Rumpke recovers in the region.

Snyder says he hasn’t seen many MRFs outside of California that can identify and separate thermoformed clear polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic fruit and berry containers.

“Every material recovery facility that I’ve ever been in across the country has always put PET together as one grade. Whether it was a PET cup, a PET thermoform or a PET bottle, it was always baled together,” Snyder says. “The first thing that happens when we send it is … the thermoforms and cups and color are stripped away from the clear bottles because they can only make clear bottles out of clear bottles. So, I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could segregate the material at the MRF?’”

Rumpke, based in Cincinnati, collaborated with Quebec-based Machinex to design a customized system to efficiently sort recyclables at the 226,000-square-foot facility, outfitted with four ballistic separators, 19 optical scanners and 10 artificial intelligence (AI) technology units. The MRF can process up to 250,000 tons of recyclables per year from more than 50 Ohio counties.

Rumpke supplies recovered materials to manufacturers within a 250-mile radius of the facility, with 80 percent of materials going to companies with operations in Ohio.

Now that Rumpke’s Columbus MRF can segregate opaque colored bottles and thermoformed plastic containers from clear PET bottles, as of Nov. 1, residents served by the MRF can begin adding thermoformed clear plastic produce containers, clear plastic carryout containers and clear plastic egg containers to their recycling carts.

Rumpke says it will bale the sorted thermoformed containers and ship them to a manufacturer that will recycle them into plastic pellets to be used in the manufacturing of various plastic products.

Waste Today spoke with Snyder about how Rumpke separates clear plastic PET using trommels to size incoming material, ballistics and optics to segregate two- and three-dimensional material and AI to identify the clear PET materials.

Waste Today (WT): What changes did you make to the MRF’s processing system to be able to separate clear PET?

Jeff Snyder (JS): There are three things, really, that we didn’t have before. No. 1, we didn’t have the sizing technology at the front of the system.

We’re using trommels, so we’re breaking the material into three different sizes before anybody sees it, or before it enters the MRF. It’s the very first thing we do. We make a 5-inch and under, we make a 5- to 12-inch and a 12-inch and over.

Because we do that, we strip the 5-inch and under away from the rest of the material immediately. So, all that small stuff, which includes glass, we strip that away immediately. … Then the rest of those small containers, small paper, all those small items, are then taken to another part of the plant and go directly to the ballistic separators. And we don’t put people in to sort it because there’s really no reason to.

[Now], because we’ve taken the 5-inch and under out of it, we can see the material better. We can get the hazards out, so that allows us to take a higher quality material to the marketplace.

The second different thing is we have no rotating polishing screens or fiber screens in the plant. Instead of using all those rotating shafts like just about every MRF in the country uses, we’re using optics and ballistic or elliptical separators to segregate two-dimensional from three-dimensional. What that allows us to do is to be more efficient in sorting paper away from containers.

Instead of using people to clean up optics, we use optics to clean up optics. What that allows us to do is there’s not one person on our container line cleaning up material. … We developed AI in front of optical scanners that identifies a thermoform from a water bottle. It can tell the difference between the two things and because of that, … segregate it.

WT: How did these advances in separation and optical sorting technology and AI affect the level of labor needed along the line?

JS: In the previous facility, when you were sorting plastics with optics, you had collateral damage, I call it, that goes with the material that the optic is sorting. If you have a piece of paper that’s lying on a PET bottle, then that paper would go with the PET bottle, and then you’d have to have people on the line … cleaning up the PET.

In this facility, it was important to me—because of the technology and the availability of the equipment that was out there in the marketplace—that we were able to reduce our workforce. As you know, MRFs have struggled over the years with people in the facilities. … Sometimes it can be difficult to find people to fill those roles. It wasn’t a huge priority that we reduced the [number of] people, but because of the technology, we were able to do it.

The people who we have in the facility sorting are now focused on presort. There [are] six people on presort, and then we have postsorters that are cleaning up paper. That’s a total of 12, and then we have nobody sorting containers. It’s all done with equipment.

The only people that we have on the container line would be one person at the aluminum cans [line], because aluminum can quality is so stringent.

We’re running a MRF at 65 tons an hour, one of the largest in the country, with 13 people. In our old facility, we were running that with about 35 people, with less product, with less productivity.

We’ve reduced the workforce in our facility by about two-thirds, but … the key to all of that [is] the people we have at our facility are much more technologically savvy than the folks we had before because they’re going to be doing more.

WT: What’s next when it comes to the MRF? Do you have another commodity you’re looking to add to the stream?

JS: It’s fun to put a new commodity into the end of the stream. In the last four years, we’ve done tubs, cups and thermoforms, and we love that. But instead of going into a new commodity, I think we need to focus our time on how we get better at the basics. Just shy of 70 percent of the material we want is still going to our landfills, No. 1 [PET], No. 2 [HDPE] the No. 5 [PP].

So maybe the focus needs to be, how do we help the public and build trust, build access? How do we build the infrastructure even more within our MRF shed of Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana to be able to help people get more of the stuff we’ve been wanting for a long time?

What’s next is maybe taking a step back. We’re good at recovering recyclables. So, how can we get that [message] to the public? That’s so key.

We need [education], and we do that by supporting the public, by supporting municipalities and solid waste districts and working in tandem with these guys to get better messaging and better trust and access out there in the marketplace. And that’s really what we’re going to focus on moving forward.

Jeff Snyder is senior vice president of recycling and sustainability at Cincinnati-based Rumpke Waste & Recycling. For more information, visit www.rumpke.com.