Athens Services to open Irwindale, California, MRF

Athens Services, a leading waste and recycling services company in Southern California, soon will open a new material recovery facility (MRF) in Irwindale, California, to process a variety of material streams, including dry commercial, residential, mixed residential and dry municipal solid waste (MSW), with a processing capacity of 70 tons per hour. The MRF, designed and installed by CP Group, San Diego, is engineered to be highly flexible, with the ability to recover recyclables or create a refuse-derived fuel (RDF) product, the supplier says.

Construction of the Irwindale MRF began in September 2024 and is nearing completion. The facility is expected to be fully operational by May of this year.

The MRF is housed in a new 155,500-square-foot building in Los Angeles County’s San Gabriel Valley and is projected to divert nearly 200,000 tons of material from landfills annually, CP Group says.

The MRF features two infeed lines, each with 35 tons per hour of capacity. The use of a CP Auger Screen means the system does not require a traditional presort station, reducing manual sorting and increasing system throughput and safety. The OCC Auger Screen fractionates large materials, such as old corrugated containers (OCC), wood, rigid materials, metals, and large trash. Smaller materials pass through another series of scalping auger screens for further material fractionation.

Next, a CP Disc Screen separates two-dimensional from three-dimensional materials, preparing them for downstream sorting using near-infrared (NIR) and artificial intelligence (AI) systems paired with air ejection. The MRF will be equipped with 16 MSS NIR Optical Sorters and MSS FiberMax Optical Sorters, which will sort fiber at belt speeds of 1,000 feet per minute with more than 1,000 picks per minute, offering flexibility to produce mixed paper grades or RDF, CP Group says.

The completely automated container line will include a secondary infeed design that allows the operator to process mixed containers without running the front end of the system. The container line includes six NIR MSS PlasticMax Optical Sorters and two MSS Vivid AI units to perform quality control for aluminum and polyethylene terephthalate (PET), while high-density polyethylene (HDPE) is quality-controlled using multilane PlasticMax sorters. CP Group says Vivid AI technology combines AI sensors with air ejection for precision sorting, ensuring optimal recovery and quality control for containers.

“This facility represents a new era in waste management and sustainability for Athens Services and the communities we serve,” says Riel Johnson, vice president of Resource Recovery at Athens Services. “By combining cutting-edge technology with sustainable practices, we’re leading the way in resource recovery.”

Terry Schneider, president and CEO, CP Group, says, “Athens Services and CP Group have a longstanding relationship, and we are truly honored to be their partners in opening this new state-of-the-art materials recovery facility, poised to be one of the largest and most technologically advanced in the nation.”

CP Group provides a variety of sorting solutions worldwide, including MRF engineering design, manufacturing, installation and customer services. The company’s custom turnkey systems include residential recycling, commercial and industrial, municipal solid waste, engineered fuel, construction and demolition, fiber sorting, plastic sorting and electronic scrap processing.