WESTERN METROPOLITAN RECYCLING FACILITY

On Wednesday the 18th of November the Premier of Victoria the Honourable John Brumby MP officially opened the $45 million Western Metropolitan Recycling Facility with the unveiling of a plaque from the Victorian Government, reports TEGAN ELDRIDGE, CMPA Development Officer

THE plant, which is now the largest of its kind in Australia will increase Victoria’s capacity for construction and demolition (C&D) recycling as it produces almost one third of Victoria’s recycled product. The plant and all of its design efforts are fully owned and operated by the Alex Fraser group.

The team who designed the plant have focused on “productivity, operator safety, energy efficiency and product quality” said Alex Fraser Group Managing Director Jamie McKellar. The in house team of designers all remain with the company today through a range of projects.

The plant has the capacity for a throughput of 400 tonnes per hour and has the ability to recycle up to one million tonnes of C&D material annually. Th is will greatly increase capacity from the old plant which could produce 150 tonne per hour and only 200,000 tonne annually.

Much of the plant has been made from recycled products previously acquired by the Alex Fraser Group through their C&D operations. This includes 26.5 tonne of recycled steel, as well as all 3 water tanks and the viewing platform. This is yet another part of the plant which was designed with a vision to a cleaner environment.

State of the art safety features have been implemented into the plant, such as:

• Interlocked guarding to disallow machinery from being started when a guard has been removed
• Restricted area zones disallow employees from certain areas while the plant is running, these are restricted by a key system with interlocked gates
• Oversize walkways to allow easier access to all areas of the plant
• The Piano Finger Screen which removes much of the work previously performed through manual labour

The plant possesses dual jaw crushers which give the plant the ability to simultaneously accept raw feed, such as rock and asphalt, as well as recycled products including concrete and other demolition materials. The first jaw crusher is used only for rock, which breaks the product into particles of size suitable for the second jaw. When crushing recycled products, raw feed is fed into the second jaw, therefore bypassing the rock jaw entirely.

The dual jaw crusher decreases the amount of machinery work required to reduce raw material size prior to feeding the primary. Given the contaminants in recycled material, the Alex Fraser Group have incorporated a multi-layered cleaning system to remove products such as wood, plastics, paper and steel, in order to reduce manual labour required at the plants two picking stations.

The innovative design incorporates three magnets, the Air Knife and the Piano Finger Screen. These modernizations from the original plant at the Laverton site provide for a significant decrease in contamination of the fi nal product.

The Supervisor Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system is located in three sites. The control room and laboratory have interactive screens while the managers’ office has a view only version of the soft ware. The Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) provides instantaneous information to each of the control monitors.

The ten CCTV cameras located around the plant can also be viewed and rotated from the interactive monitors to provide vision to any spots the operator does not have a clear view of.

The Radial Telescopic Stacker reduces carbon emissions through elimination of material double handling. The radial stacker has the ability to rotate 270 degrees and can stockpile up to 50,000 tonnes of product in a single location. The stacker decreases segregation and compaction caused by heavy machinery working on the stockpile.

The plant has been built below ground level in order to reduce the carbon emission caused by loading equipment running along an inclined ramp to feed the primary. The final product is conveyed back to ground level in order to stockpile ready for pugmill production to avoid loaders or trucks transporting the material back to ground level.

The pugmill has the capacity to produce 600 tonnes of wet mix per hour. The 60 tonne load out bin, allows for much faster and more efficient loading of trucks and reduces double handling of material. This technology significantly decreases the load time required for trucks, allowing customers to receive the products much faster and more efficiently.

By 2014 the Alex Fraser Group plans to have recycled 40 million tonnes of C&D, a large increase on their current level of more than 22 million tonne. The innovation and design of this new plant will record an outstanding achievement in line with the Victorian Governments 2005 Towards Zero Waste Strategy spoken of by the Premier John Brumby at the grand opening.

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