EBI recently invested more than $2 million to upgrade its material recovery facility (MRF) located in Joliette, Province of Quebec. In operation since September 12th, EBI Environnement’s facility is now one of the most sophisticated and technically advanced MRF in Quebec.

This major upgrade was completed by Machinex, a company based in Plessisville, Quebec, that specializes in machinery designed for MRFs. The investment permitted the acquisition of state-of-the-art technologies, including a ballistic separator which can sort fibers (newspaper, paper, etc.), containers and fines, as well as a ferrous metal magnet, and an eddy current separator that sorts aluminum. Three MACH Hyspec optical sorters are also a part of the system. The first one cleans newspaper, the second one ejects PET and fibers, and the third one sorts HDPE as well as mixed plastics. The equipment allows to mechanically sort upstream to the room where manual sorting is done.

Now that the modernized MRF is in function, a significant change can be seen in the way that things are done. Employees that formerly had to manually sort an enormous quantity of materials are now working to the final quality control of containers and prints that are arriving on the sorting table.

“For EBI Environnement, continuous improvement of our way of doing things and equipment are the center of our preoccupations,” Audrey Castonguay, director of communications at EBI, said in a statement. “With our new equipment we can increase the overall quality of material recovered, particularly with fibers, plastic and aluminum containers.”

“Optical sorting has become a major component of MRF’s upgrades since it can sort a large quantity of materials within a short period of time, and obtain a higher quality,” David Marcouiller, Machinex’s executive vice president of sales engineering, said in a statement.

“We are really proud to have worked on this upgrading project at EBI, since it has been a Machinex’s long-time client with whom we have established a trusting relationship. It is important to highlight the exceptional collaboration of EBI’s team during the installation of the new equipment. This excellent collaboration with the client has been the key element that allowed us to deliver the project within the deadlines,” Marcouiller added.

Earlier this year, Machinex installed and started up a container sorting line at Cascades Recovery in Ottawa.

Machinex was appointed by Cascades Recovery to complete a major retrofit of their containers sorting line to obtain a higher purity of containers and increase the throughput, while maintaining a minimum of manual sorting. The processing capacity has increased from seven to 15 tons per hour due to the modernization which allowed it to reduce the operation time from two shifts to one.

A Machinex system was also part of an upgrade at a Chicago MRF in May. The new system included advanced sorting technologies, such as a series of discs screen separators to sort cardboard and newspapers and a finishing screen to increase the quality on mixed fibers. An optical sorter sorts PET bottles. Also included into the system are ferrous and a non-ferrous separators to sort metal containers, a baler for plastic film, and a glass cleanup system. The system has a capacity of 22.5 tons per hour.

At WasteExpo, the company also introduced its II Ram high capacity baler series to the American market.