Recovered fiber packers can consider several telltale signs that could signal it’s time to shop for a new baler.

CVB Ecologistics, based in Tilburg, Netherlands, has a dozen balers operating at its nine recycling plants in Belgium, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, says Wil van Dommelen, who has purchasing manager responsibilities for the firm.

While the firm processes plastic and textiles, baling recovered fiber represents a large portion of CVB’s recycling activity.

According to van Dommelen, he and his colleagues take several factors into consideration when determining when the company’s bottom line will benefit from replacing an existing baler with a new one.

As portrayed by van Dommelen, CVB takes a proactive approach when assessing baler performance. The time to start shopping for a replacement baler, he says, “will be the moment that your baler can no longer deliver the performance which you were used to or which you need, such as the tonnage per hour.”

When output decreases, “also your cost calculation (price per ton) is no longer correct,” he adds.

Van Dommelen continues, “Such a reduction in performance is usually a combination of several defects in the baler, or when there is a risk of major costs for a baler. A baler has standard wear parts that need to be replaced periodically, such as guide strips, movable parts in the strapping system, hydraulic components and valves, oil filters, etc., but these are usually the smaller costs that have to be made to keep the baler productive.”

Beyond the accumulating smaller costs, “There can also be a large cost to a baler that makes it ever wiser to replace the baler with a new one,” the recycler says. “Examples of this [can be] the press channel has worn out in such a way that there is too much play on the ram, and therefore also play on the master cylinder, which could break off again as a result. At that moment, it is wise to opt for a new press.”

Fluid leaks can be another sign a baler is showing its age. “If the hydraulic seals in the valve block (the baler’s motor) are so worn that internal leaks occur and the baler can no longer build up its original pressure, then it is usually the time to replace it,” van Dommelen says. “Practice often shows that repairing never gives the same result as new.”

Maintenance plays a role in how long a baler can last, he notes, but so too can the design and fabrication quality of the baler itself. “A high-quality press [that] is also well maintained and that has been handling a fairly easy-to-process product can last for 20 to 30 years or longer,” van Dommelen says. He cautions, “There are also cheaper presses for sale with an expected lifespan—a lot less—possibly only 10 years.”

The baler shopping process then creates a new decision tree, with considerations that include how much tonnage a baler will be asked to handle and what types of materials.

“The size and capacity of the press must be geared to the quantities that you want to process on it,” van Dommelen says. Even if old corrugated containers (OCC) are a predominant grade handled, recyclers still need machines that can handle varying infeeds, he adds.

“As a recycler, you have to ensure that you can process all sizes and qualities on it, and some qualities must first be changed in structure by means of a shredder or conditioner/ruffler before a sturdy stackable bale can be made,” van Dommelen says.

For OCC, he says it is “important to know the dimensions of the OCC to determine how big the conveyor belt and the hopper you need are and what size baler you need. In order to be able to process all incoming cardboard, a baler with a large filling opening (2 meters, or 6.5 feet) is recommended.”

The company’s steady intake of OCC means CVB seeks out several standard features. He says of the company’s 12 balers, “They all have about the same capacity, varying from 120 tons to 140 tons press force and press capacity up to 50 or 60 tons per hour (depending on the product).”

The CVB balers all are “equipped with the largest possible supply conveyor belt and filling funnel, and our balers can handle just about all qualities, regardless of which location or depot they arrive at,” van Dommelen says.

Baler manufacturers compete to offer new features, which van Dommelen says should be a due diligence factor in the shopping process. “If that new technology can contribute to increasing the tonnage per hour or make it possible to process difficult-to-process products more easily, then it is a matter of calculating how much time such an improvement or investment will take to have it earned back,” the recycler adds. “It could also be the reason to invest in a new faster or better baler.”

CVB Ecologistics has a baler fleet that varies in age, van Dommelen says, because the company does not retire a baler unless it shows clear signs of not maintaining its productivity.

“This includes balers that are only a year old, but there are also balers that are already 20 years old,” van Dommelen says of CVB’s balers. “So, the age of the baler is not a reason to process less tonnage on it. The capacity of a baler is not only judged by age but also by the defects that occur as they get older.”

The pulp and paper manufacturer agreed to sell the mill when it acquired Domtar in November of last year.

The Paper Excellence Group, a manufacturer of pulp and specialty, printing, writing and packaging papers that is based in Richmond, British Columbia, has announced its subsidiary, Fort Hill, South Carolina-based Domtar Inc., has entered into an agreement with an affiliate of Kruger Specialty Papers Holding LP to sell its Kamloops pulp mill.

Domtar and Paper Excellence did not disclose the amount of the agreement, but the transaction is expected to close by the end of the second quarter of this year.

Domtar's Kamloop's mill, located in Kamloops, British Columbia, uses softwood fiber from third-party sawmills in the region to produce high-quality northern bleached softwood kraft pulp and unbleached softwood kraft for customers in North America, China and Southeast Asia, according to the company. The mill has one fiber line and an annual pulp production capacity of 408,000 metric tons.

Built in 1965, Domtar says the Kamloops mill produces pulp for a diverse range of products, including personal hygiene, building siding, dishware and more.

When Paper Excellence acquired Domtar in November 2021 and entered into a consent agreement with Canada's commissioner of competition, it agreed to sell the Kamloops mill to resolve the commissioner's concerns about the merger's implications on the purchase of wood fiber from the Thompson-Okanagan region in British Columbia.

Domtar currently is in the process of converting a printing and writing mill in Kingsport, Tennessee, into a containerboard mill, which will produce 600,000 tons per year of recycled-content linerboard and medium while consuming approximately 700,000 tons of recovered fiber per year. The project is expected to be completed by the first quarter of next year.

The robotic picker, developed in collaboration with Fanuc, can sort materials like PET, HDPE, PE, PP, aluminum and paper at 55 picks per minute.

Recycleye, a waste and recycling technology based in London, has announced it will showcase its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered robotic pickers at IFAT 2022 in Munich. The company says the equipment, called Recycleye Robotics, can identify and sort materials faster than humans.  

In response to the high operating expenditures associated with manual picking in material recovery facilities, Recycleye developed an AI-powered computer vision system, called Recycleye Vision, which identifies every item on a waste stream using a low-cost camera and machine learning algorithms. This system is integrated with the robot, a picker developed in partnership with Japan-based manufacturer Fanuc, which automates the physical task of separating waste items into pure material streams.   

The machine has several applications, including negative sorting. It can sort materials like polyethylene terephthalate (PET), high-density polyethylene (HDPE), polyethylene/polypropylene (PE/PP), aluminum and paper.  

The company says it installed the first wave of waste-sorting robots of their kind in material recovery facilities in the UK, France and Italy. These installations have achieved up to 55 successful picks per minute, less than 1 percent contamination and an increase in output volume of the target material by 12 percent at some sites.   

The company says through this technology, the global waste sorting processes could sort to higher granularities with more efficiency, extracting things like food-grade PET from residual lines. This would lower the cost of waste sorting and increase profit margins on resale bales due to the higher purity of the material.  

“By rendering recycling a more economically attractive proposition, our technology will prevent more of Europe’s valuable recyclable materials being lost to landfills, proving that waste doesn’t exist, only materials in the wrong place,” Recycleye CEO Victor DeWulf says.  

Recycleye is exhibiting at IFAT 2022 in Munich from May 30 to June 3 and will be in the startup area in Hall B4 on Stand 34. 

The Pennsylvania company says a liquidation sales event has been scheduled for May 23-25.

Deacon Equipment Co. (DEC), a forestry, sawmill and recycling equipment dealer based in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, has announced it’s closing its doors after more than 27 years in business. Owners Walt and Wendy Deacon gave no firm closing date, but it is expected the shop will close by Oct. 31.  

"We attribute our success to the hard work and talents of our sales, parts, service, and support staff and a very loyal customer base," Wendy Deacon says.   

Deacon primarily sells grinding and shearing equipment  from Morbark, however it also sells equipment like skid steers from Fecon, Boxer and Rayco.   

The company says Walt Deacon's affiliation with Morbark began in 1981 when he held management positions at the company's headquarters in Winn, Michigan. His responsibilities continued to grow with the company, and in 1986 Walt became the president of a new subsidiary company, Morbark Pennsylvania Inc. After Morbark Pennsylvania closed in 1995, Walt started DEC, selling Morbark parts. By 1997, DEC became a full Morbark industrial equipment dealer and added the tree care line in 2005.   

"We will begin the liquidation process immediately so my wife and I can spend more time with our six children and eight grandchildren while also taking time for travel," Deacon says.   

The company announced that it has scheduled a sales event for May 23-25, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at its Bloomsburg facility located at 22 Wedgetown Road. The sale will feature a 10 percent discount on all nonwear parts, additional discounts on many parts, and free apparel gifts for all attendees while supplies last. All sales will be final and must be paid for at purchase. 

The site will be able to process up to 10,000 metric tons of manufacturing scrap and end-of-life batteries per year.

Li-Cycle Holdings Corp., with headquarters in Toronto, has begun commercial operations in Gilbert, Arizona. This site is the company’s third spoke facility, joining plants in Kingston, Ontario, and Rochester, New York. However, the Arizona site is the first to use proprietary technology that processes full electric vehicle, or EV, battery packs without dismantling them manually, making recycling of those battery packs safer, sustainable and more labor efficient, the company says.

The facility is strategically located near Li-Cycle’s existing battery and manufacturing scrap supply network in the southwestern U.S. to optimize logistics and other efficiencies for recycling services. Additionally, Arizona presents a significant opportunity for lithium-ion battery recycling in light of the emerging EV supply chain in the region, as well as its proximity to large markets such as California, which are expected to produce an increasing supply of end-of-life batteries available for recycling from EVs, energy storage projects and consumer electronics, the company says.

The primary output of the Arizona spoke is black mass, consisting of a number of critical metals, including lithium, cobalt and nickel, which Li-Cycle says it will convert into battery-grade materials at its first North American hub, which is under construction in Rochester, New York. Li-Cycle says it expects that the Hub will be able to process 35,000 metric tons of black mass annually, with commissioning targeted for 2023.

“The launch of Li-Cycle’s innovative battery recycling facility bolsters Arizona’s already robust EV supply chain and sends a signal that Arizona is the place to be for electric batteries,” says Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey. “Sustainable industries have found a home in Arizona, and few companies represent the innovation and possibilities that brings like Li-Cycle. We are proud to see Li-Cycle’s facility up and operational.”

“We are excited Li-Cycle’s innovative battery recycling facility has commenced operations,” says Sandra Watson, President and CEO of the Arizona Commerce Authority. “Li-Cycle’s Arizona Spoke will increase EV battery recycling capabilities, strengthening Arizona’s battery and electric vehicle supply chains while creating quality jobs in the community.”

“We are pleased to announce that our Arizona spoke is operational,” says Richard Storrie, regional president, Americas, of Li-Cycle. “This new state-of-the-art facility enhances our ability to serve the recycling needs of our customers while significantly increasing our operational recycling capacity. We’re also creating an additional domestic source of critical metals to be transformed and supply lithium-ion battery production.”

Li-Cycle held a grand opening event earlier this month at the 140,000-square-foot facility, where the company was joined by its customers, local government officials and others connected to the Gilbert community and surrounding area

Li-Cycle’s Alabama spoke, which is of the same design as the Arizona site, is scheduled to be operational in the third quarter of the company’s 2022 fiscal year. When the Arizona and Alabama spokes are operational, Li-Cycle will have a total processing capacity of 30,000 metric tons annually. By the end of 2023, the company says it expects to have a total of 65,000 metric tons of lithium-ion battery processing capacity per year across its spokes in North America and Europe.