BlueMAC’s fines clean-up plant at KCM Rotherham is a huge success
KCM have operated on this large Rotherham site since 1996, and ideally located near the M1 and M18, they cover Sheffield, Rotherham, Barnsley, Doncaster and Chesterfield. They have 70 staff, operate two daily shifts, 6 days a week, and the main input streams are C&D, general trade waste from local councils and businesses, transfer waste from other stations, kerbside collections, as well as material from their own 23 trade waste vehicles.
They have purchased a huge variety of Blue machines over the past 20 years including BlueMAC plant, Fuchs, Doppstadt and Powerscreen. They have a complete BlueMAC SRF plant, a bespoke 12 bay BlueMAC picking station with integrated feeder and trommel, and more recently a complete BlueMAC fines clean-up system.
Mark Hickling, partner at KCM talked with us about the operation “The fines clean-up system includes a brand new BlueMAC air separator, the first one to be installed in the UK, a long piece separator which takes out long pieces of material and spreads the remaining material more evenly on the belt. I’d advise anyone looking for this type of system to include one of these, because it spreads the material over the belt so that the over-band magnet can then operate much more efficiently. BlueMAC put huge amounts of effort into making sure that this piece of kit was fully optimised for our site, and their engineers spent lots of time here on site to make that happen.”
“We’ve had a great relationship with Blue and their service is very good indeed – there are a big outfit but there is always someone you can get hold of. We have a very busy operation so minimum downtime is really important to us, and all of our machines have been maintained really well by BlueMAC and Blue’s service team. Throughput is very high on the site and we separate out as many different materials as possible to keep land-fill to an absolute minimum. We also blend different materials where possible to give final usable products that we can then sell on.”
Walking around the plant Mark pointed out the fact that BlueMAC’s attention to detail in the manufacture of plant is excellent, providing those detailed finishing touches that do make a huge difference such as ease of access, walkway quality and even good quality fitted plastic caps on the ends of tubular handrails.
Mark further explained “Once the smaller fraction material has passed through the fines clean-up, the finished ‘light’ product here is very clean because of the shredding process provided by the Doppstadt shredder, it shreds the material using more teeth and then splits the material apart moving it more evenly through the machine. Once this light material comes off the belt to the stockpile we have a totally open sided but covered area for storage as this is much safer because of the heat omitted by the material. We are also looking to expand this area of the site with the addition of a new burner and dryer for drying material to achieve a better CV, and also lose some weight from the material.”
“Working with Blue, we have found simplicity is best, and the proof is here on this site with a highly effective overall system flow comprising shredder, trommel, air separation, picking station, magnets, eddy current, and an end shredder. With a new DMR line planned very soon, we will look to expand the business to separate out cardboard, glass, plastic bottles, and metal tins due to increased demand from the local area’s recycling needs.”
Fines Clean Up
The Fines Clean Up Plant is fed from the +50mm material extracted from the BlueMAC recycling plant previously installed at the site. The hopper, loaded by a Fuchs material handler feeds the long piece separator before an over-band magnet extracts the ferrous. The material is then fed to a flip-flow screen taking out the -10mm material, with the remainder being fed into the UK’s first BlueMAC Typhoon Air Density Separator. The main concept of the Typhoon is material being fed, via an acceleration belt to an ‘ejection edge’. From there, material falls into an up current, generated through an adjustable air jet which is attached to the machine underneath the feeding belt. The air stream meets the upper area of a rotation drum, which takes any light material over the top and into an expansion chamber. Heavy material, unaffected by the air jet, falls below onto a conveyor which extracts this denser material from the machine.
The light fraction separated in the Typhoon goes into RDF production with the heavies being crushed along with other rubble coming into the site by a Powerscreen Premiertrak 300 jaw. The resulting 6F2 is then sold for road construction.