New MRF facility at Neth Port Talbot, Wales

Ken Mills Engineering has installed a materials recovery and recycling (MRF) plant at Neath Port Talbot in South Wales, UK. The plant includes metal separation equipment designed and manufactured by Bunting-Redditch, including an overband permanent magnet and an eddy current separator.

Bunting is one of the world’s leading designers and manufacturers of magnetic separators, eddy current separators, metal detectors and electrostatic separators, with manufacturing facilities located worldwide.

Ken Mills Engineering (KME) is one of the UK’s leading manufacturers of MRF systems, balers, twin raw material balers, conveyors and shredders. The KME team designs, builds and services an MRF to suit warehouse space, types and volume of waste material to be processed or final quality requirements.

The container recycling MRF at Neath Port Talbot processes dry mixed recyclables such as film, plastics and cans. The design of the MRF allows for easy future modification, enabling the council to add other separation technology, such as optical sorting, if required.
At the plant, up to three tons per hour of dry mixed recyclables pass through a bag splitter for release before a ballistic screen, which removes fines and separates heavies and films. Both technologies were supplied by BRT HARTNER.

The heavy fraction passes through a pre-sorting cabin where films and unwanted products are manually removed, before traveling on a 900 mm wide conveyor under a Bunting overband permanent magnet (model 10PCB6) to recover steel food and beverage cans.
The remaining non-magnetic fraction (approximately 2.1 tons per hour) is fed onto the 1000 mm wide belt of a Bunting eddy current separator for the recovery of aluminum cans. The recovered non-ferrous material passes through a quality control booth to check for any unwanted contamination.

The sorted aluminum and plastic fractions are baled in a KME Aries twin baler, producing high-density bales.
“Bunting’s metal separators are just one stage in a successful recycling process,” explained Tom Higginbottom, a Bunting sales engineer who worked on the project with KME.explained Tom Higginbottom, a Bunting sales engineer who worked on the project with KME. “The ability to successfully recover steel and aluminum depends on the feed. The excellent design of the plant means that there is a released feed to both the overband magnet and the eddy current separator, allowing the best possible recovery of metals.”