Lending hands

Fresno, California-based Caglia Environmental prioritizes staying on top of technology at its Cedar Avenue Recycling & Transfer Station (CARTS), which is a fully integrated material recovery facility (MRF). The 18-acre site handles trash, construction and demolition (C&D) debris, organics and commercial and residential recyclables. It has the ability to process a total of up to 3,100 tons of material per day.

Since 2004, Caglia Environmental continually has upgraded equipment at CARTS to ensure efficiency, including making a few major investments in recent years.

In early 2021, Caglia Environmental retrofitted CARTS with a new processing line from San Diego-based CP Group. In 2022, the company received a grant from The Recycling Partnership, Washington, to add robots to help sort polypropylene (PP). Caglia Environmental also has added a robot to its high-density polyethylene (HDPE) line as well as a tandem unit on its last-chance and used beverage can (UBC) lines.

Rich Caglia, owner and president of corporate development at Caglia Environmental, says these latest upgrades will help to improve safety at the MRF and boost material recovery rates.

Speed up the system

In 2019, Caglia Environmental recognized that it needed to increase processing speed on CARTS’ commercial recycling line to stay competitive and boost recovery rates. At the time, the facility was only processing 12 to 15 tons per hour (tph) with limited mechanical sorting.

“The facility had an older commercial recycling line,” says Mike Ledieff, division manager at Caglia Environmental.

He says rising contamination levels in the inbound material stream and increasing pressure from the state of California to limit the amount of material going to landfill played a role in Caglia Environmental’s decision to upgrade the commercial line at CARTS.

“There’s all kinds of things we’ve redone over the years, but it came time when we needed the latest and best technology,” Caglia says.

Caglia Environmental decided to retrofit CARTS with a new system from CP Group, hoping to double the MRF’s throughput. The company completed the project in early 2021.

Ledieff says the upgrade included a new metering box, an auger screen, an anti-wrapping screen, an OCCScreen, a CPScreen, two FiberMax optical sorters, two PlasticMax optical sorters, a barrel magnet and an eddy current.

He says the auger screen has been a “game-changer” at the front of the system, reducing burden depth and distributing the material better.

“It’s so much easier for our presort employees to [perform quality control] on the presort,” Ledieff says. “You’ve got less black belt, less burden depth [and] good distribution of material, which is safer and more effective for our employees.”

Caglia adds that the screening improvements have helped CARTS process more materials at faster speeds. By installing the new system, the MRF increased its processing capacity from 12 to 15 tph to 30 to 35 tph.

Boosting recovery rates

Ledieff says the company considered whether artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics might alleviate staffing concerns and help to recover more materials. The company previously had trouble hiring a manual sorter to perform quality control on CARTS’ Nos. 3-7 line, he adds.

“It was a line that did not always get staffed,” he says. “We made a 3-7 bale if I was lucky enough to have an employee, but it was hard during the pandemic.”

Ledieff says he heard about The Recycling Partnership’s Polypropylene Recycling Coalition grants that provide funding to MRFs to improve and increase PP sorting rates, and it seemed like a good opportunity for the MRF to transition that line from recovering plastics Nos. 3-7 to recovering PP.

Brittany LaValley, director of circular ventures at The Recycling Partnership, says Caglia Environmental scored “well across the board” when it applied for the grant.

“They have great access, a high household count, a great opportunity to reach more households and recover more materials and leveraged funding for the work they were looking to do,” she says. When the company applied for the grant, it was sending its Nos. 3-7 bales to the landfill, she adds. “We saw it as a good opportunity to make sure the polypropylene was going to be accepted and recovered.”

LaValley says Polypropylene Recycling Coalition grant recipients must recover PP for five years and agree to report data related to PP recovery to The Recycling Partnership.

Although neither Caglia Environmental nor The Recycling Partnership could share the specific grant amount, LaValley says Polypropylene Recycling Coalition grants vary by project and tend to range from $300,000 to $350,000.

CARTS added a robot from Denver-based Amp Robotics. Ledieff adds that transitioning the company’s Nos. 3-7 line to a PP line will help the MRF recover more valuable materials than it had been recovering previously.

“That material that was going into the 3-7 mix wasn’t as valuable as solely PP,” he explains.

“So far, we’re seeing positive numbers on PP,” Ledieff says. “Between the optical sorters and robots, I’m confident that we’re on at least a 90 percent recovery [rate for] PP, and I’m really excited about that. It’s marketable material; we haven’t had an issue with getting that [material] out to the mills.”

CARTS added two other robots from Amp Robotics to its facility—one robotic arm on its HDPE line and a tandem unit on its UBC and last-chance lines.

According to Amp Robotics, the units CARTS installed can perform from 70 to 80 picks per minute per robotic arm and use Amp’s vision system to identify materials coming across the lines. Amp says it provided training to CARTS employees just before the robots were installed and visited CARTS to adjust the equipment as needed.

Ledieff says adding robotics has alleviated some staffing challenges, enabling him to relocate some of CARTS’ workers from quality control positions to other areas at the MRF.

“We’re able to strategically staff people in critical places to increase our bandwidth and throughput,” he says. “The robots aren’t perfect—there’s a perception that they are—but neither are human sorters for that matter. As [the robots] get smarter, we’ll improve our efficiencies. … It will make [our] product cleaner. With robots, we have increased diversion, identifying more high-quality and more marketable materials. There will be financial value to that.”

Continuing improvements

Caglia Environmental plans to continue seeking new technologies to improve its CARTS facility. Currently, the company is considering how to automate and improve its polyethylene terephthalate quality control line to remove thermoforms from the material stream.

“We’re always looking, identifying the latest and greatest technologies and bringing the most effective ones to the table. We’ve been successful with the upgrades we’ve made in the last couple of years,” Ledieff says.

Caglia adds that legislation also has prompted Caglia Environmental to investigate technologies that could help improve landfill diversion rates. While the company has one employee exclusively focused on new legislation and regulations, he says he encourages all company employees to keep tabs on legislation related to the waste and recycling industry.

Ledieff says Caglia Environmental is “definitely looking to see what legislation is on the horizon so we can be ahead of the game in making sure that we meet diversion goals of the municipalities that we work with.”

The author is an associate editor for the Recycling Today Media Group and can be reached at msmalley@gie.net.