Source: Resource Recycling
Located roughly in the middle of the Green Mountain State, 45 miles west of New Hampshire and 20 miles east of New York state, Rutland, Vermont is also home not only to the Casella Zero-Sort Recycling Facility upgraded just over a year ago, but is also the headquarters of the owner of the MRF, Casella Waste Systems.
The 58,000-square-foot recycling facility manages materials collected from a variety of residential subscription, commercial and municipal customers throughout Vermont, eastern New York and western New Hampshire. The materials, which are approximately 70 percent fiber and 22 percent commingled containers, are primarily collected from single-stream programs, though some materials come from dual- or multi-stream collection programs.
The facility’s 15 tons-per-hour separation system, designed, built and installed by CP Manufacturing, Inc., has three lines: a mixed fiber line, one for newspaper sortation and a comingled container line. The system includes OCC and mixed paper screens, a Harris Badger baler, a Javelin eddy current separator and a Dings Mag Drum magnet wheel. The company expects to process over 30,000 tons of materials in 2013.
The MRF has an average residue rate of 8 percent and when asked what the biggest issue the facility has to deal with, Casella’s director of marketing, Marc Okrant, said “Though film or plastic bags can be difficult to handle, at the Rutland MRF we’ve become very effective at collecting and baling them for market.”
When the facility was built, the building was retrofitted for energy savings, including installing occupancy sensors for all internal and external lighting. Okrant also noted that the company will soon be adding capacitors to the MRF in order to conserve energy during daily start-up.
“Under Vermont’s recently-enacted recycling legislation, Act 148, haulers will be required to offer recycling along with trash pick-up and municipalities will be required to have public recycling receptacles alongside trash receptacles,” said Okrant. “Having single-stream processing with ample capacity provides a convenient recycling outlet for the additional materials to be extracted from the waste stream in order to comply with the new law.” The Rutland, Vermont’s Casella Zero-Sort Recycling Facility has 25 full-time employees working one shift five days a week.
Technical Specifications:
Location:
Rutland, Vermont
Start-up date:
November 2011
Number of processing lines:
Three
Throughput:
15 tons per hour
Tons of material expected to
be processed in 2013:
Over 30,000 tons
Residue rate:
An average of 8 percent
