McLeod County Solid Waste and Recycling is a municipally operated facility in Hutchinson, Minnesota. Sarah Young, Solid Waste Coordinator said, “the county determined there was a public and private need to convert the existing dual-stream recycling program to single-stream.”
The county consulted with a local engineering firm, Burns and McDonnell to complete the design-build for the project and find a vendor that could best convert the county’s existing dual-stream system to single stream within its budget.
“The engineers at Green Machine® devised a unique system design that incorporated all of the existing dual-stream equipment within their single-stream system upgrade. Their design efficiencies greatly enhanced McLeod County’s system while meeting their budget,”explained Robert Craggs, Solid Waste and Resource Recovery Manager at Burns andMcDonnell.
Hopp notified material buyers that the county was switching from MRF to single-stream, in order to avoid surprising them with higher contamination levels in their bales. After moving to single-stream, buyers didn’t notice any reduction in quality, and McLeod County is still able to receive premium pricing for its baled recyclables.
The MRF continued to operate during the installation of the new single-stream system, because the county didn’t want to lose revenue, and had no place to stockpile collected recyclables. The entire group agrees, that this was not an easy and straight forward installation.
Donnie Hopp, McLeod County’s Material Recovery Facility (MRF) Manager is very pleased with their new single-stream’s performance. The volume of material the MRF is processing has increased by 20% since the county converted to single-stream recycling in the spring of 2015, adding that residents have responded well to the change and are keeping contamination at a minimum.
“We were operating at promised production rates within one week of commissioning on schedule,” said Hopp. “The Green Machine® system started up with very few hiccups. We are now accepting both municipal and private hauler collected single-stream and industrial and commercial waste.”
John Green, President of Green Machine®, says, “I feel that one of our strengths is our willingness to integrate existing site conditions and equipment into a simplistic system design. Integrating cost savings through use of existing equipment enabled the deployment of new a metering bin feeder system, Z-Pan infeed system, presort, two-deck OCC screen with post-sort, glass breaker, eddy current and single-sided container sort with automation of existing bunker systems.”
Hopp was impressed that John Green, as the President of the company, took the time to visit the facility.
“John and the team were great to work with, and I would definitely work with them again," said Hopp.
