Casual Living Unlimited’s newly commissioned baled plastics processing plant began accepting mixed bales this January. Casual Living needed a cost effective and more reliable source of clean feed stock for his high-quality plastic-wood furniture company.
“My furniture company depends on high-quality resins to produce the exotic color schemes that separate us from the competition,” said James Allgyer Owner of Casual Living. “Green Machine® designed and manufactured a system that delivered us the clean product we needed to feed our grinders, wash tanks and our plastic extruders.”
“It was a pleasure working with Jim Allgyer and his two sons, Justin (Furniture Plant Manager), and Jerry (Recycling Production Supervisor),” said John Green,President of Green Machine®. “All of us worked closely in determining a final design that would be capable of automatically processing highly contaminated bales of plastics.”
The Green Machine® system design begins with an in-feed system that includes a bale breaker. Mixed plastic bales with fiber, fines and residue contamination are then fed to rubber disc inclined polishing screen, where the agitation provided by high-speed rotating discs helps to declump bale fragments, meaning that waste fibers climb to the top, while plastics and fines fall off the bottom. A 2” minus fines screen then removes all small particulates, and a cross belt magnetic separator collects metals. Three Patented Green Eye® Optical sorting Sorters remove PET plastic, natural HDPE and finally colored HDPE. Each commodity is blown to huge holding bunkers with live floor conveyors that automatically feed downstream processing equipment.
“Our Green Eyes® sort cleaner than any other system I visited. We are able to sort with little or no manual post-sorting. We are ready to accept mixed plastics bales with plenty of contaminants and sort that material by grade at a rate of 10 TPH and produce the cleanest end product,” explains James Allgyer. “We are now looking to buy mixed bales of plastics from recyclers all over the East Coast and use that material to produce our high-quality furniture products. Our company is truly a full-circle recycler now.”
