Utah MSW MRF opens

Wasatch Integrated Waste Management District (WIWMD), Layton, Utah, has upgraded its municipal solid waste (MSW) material recovery facility (MRF) in Layton with help from San Diego-based CP Group. The facility serves Davis and Morgan Counties.

The opening of the new facility marks three years of planning, engineering and construction by Wasatch, according to a news release on the project issues by CP Group. The $25 million project is located at the former site of the Davis Energy Recovery Facility, a 420-ton-per-day municipal waste combustor, which was closed after 30 years of operation in May 2017. Construction on the new facility began in October 2019, and commercial operation began in June of this year.

In late 2018, Wasatch put out a request for proposals (RFP) for the construction and installation of a turnkey mixed waste processing facility with the flexibility to process multiple waste streams on a single line. Wasatch also sought to recover recyclables and organic feedstock for anaerobic digestion and to produce an engineered fuel, CP Group says.

The new facility is capable of processing 40 tons per hour of municipal solid waste or 15 tons per hour of single-stream recyclables. Through system design flexibility, Wasatch can process both material streams on the same line, its system supplier days.

The facility recovers old corrugated containers, old magazines, polyethylene terephthalate, high-density polyethylene, aluminum, steel and fines. Unrecyclable plastics and mixed paper are combined to create an engineered fuel, which can be used by industrial sources to offset their use of coal. Organics (fines) are recovered for potential use as a feedstock for anaerobic digestion.

“In considering the future of solid waste management, we wanted to build a platform that could disassemble municipal solid waste and allow us to begin recovering resources from that material before shipping it 100 miles to be buried in a landfill,” says Nathan Rich, WIWMD executive director. “We have achieved that and plan to continue developing markets for recovered materials.”

Photo courtesy of CP Group

Multiple locations in the waste management district’s system can recover refuse-derived fuel (RDF), depending on material feed composition and the requirements of the RDF customer, CP Group says. The container last-chance line and/or the 9-inch overs fractions at postsort negatively or positively recover RDF materials. Two of the three optical sorters, which were supplied by CP’s optical sorting division, MSS Inc., which is based in Nashville, Tennessee, also recover RDF. The optical sorters play a particularly important role as they can be set to eject on various blends of plastics and/or fibers to create the desired fuel product from the fiber line and/or the container line. They also prevent polyvinyl chloride plastics from entering the RDF material stream.

The system features a new CP Trommel with bag-opening knives and anti-wrapping 3D holes, a 160-inch wide CPScreen, an MSS FiberMax optical sorter, two MSS PlasticMax optical sorters, two over-belt magnets, a drum magnet, an eddy current separator and a baler. The system also includes new conveyors and platforms.

Part of the scope of work within the RFP was to reuse certain pieces of existing equipment. CP says it integrated the existing infeed system, which included a presort platform, multiple conveyors and a fines trommel, into the new system.

“Due to diverse and ever-changing markets, Wasatch presented us with the challenge of building a MRF that could not only process two material streams but also create varying commodities based on their off-take agreements,” says Branden Sidwell, CP sales engineer. “In our combined efforts with WIWMD and their consultants, RRT and GBB, we were able to develop a one-of-a-kind MRF capable of extracting varying plastic commodities, fines or organics and a customized engineered fuel.”

Consulting firms RRT Design & Construction is based in Melville, New York, while GBB (Gershman, Brickner & Bratton) Inc. is based in McClean, Virginia.  

CP Group also integrated a new controls system and a CP SCADA package to track throughput, black belt, burden depth, run time, downtime and production. The MRF controls system has preset modes that allow the operator to toggle the motor speeds and screen settings from single-stream mode to MSW mode with the push of a button, the supplier says. Other features of the CP controls allow the operator to change the direction of some material streams to either fuel production or residual, based on demand. As the RDF and organics trailers are reaching capacity, the operator is notified so that the reversing conveyors can be switched to feed the secondary trailers when necessary. The operator also is notified when the bunkers are reaching capacity, so that commodity can be baled. CP Group says these capabilities help the operator maintain production in an efficient and consistent manner.

More information about the facility, including videos and schematics, can be found at www.wasatchintegrated.org/material-recovery-and-transfer-facility. CP says Wasatch will schedule a grand opening of the facility with public tours as conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic allow.