Alpine Waste & Recycling Completes $5M Upgrade, Doubles Recycling Capacity

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Altogether RecyclingIn response to market demand, the Denver area’s biggest privately held waste management company has more than doubled its ability to process single-stream recycled materials.

Alpine Waste & Recycling says this makes it the highest-capacity recycling processor in a contiguous 10-state region.

Alpine Waste & Recycling’s $5 million investment at its Altogether Recycling Plant in Denver, Colorado added new Machinex equipment, with twice as many transfer belts, plus some material-sorting technology. The new plant can handle 30 tons of material per hour at capacity.

One new device at the plant optically identifies individual pieces of plastic and sorts them with bursts of air. Another device — a ballistic separator — bounces 2D and 3D material for better separation of paper and containers. In addition, cardboard

moves across waves of discs that separate the old corrugated containers from smaller, unrelated recycling materials.

Alpine says it will also have the first device within a Colorado single-stream plant that condenses polystyrene foam packaging material (such as Styrofoam) into recyclable bricks.

Additional improvements to the plant include logistical enhancements and equipment upgrades. Logistically, the plant will include 26 new skylights; live-floor material bunkers that empty automatically into baler infeed conveyors; multiple bin-fed return conveyors for “missed” materials; a sorting conveyor for large rigid plastics; a debris roll screen for glass and other small materials; and redundant ability to load either of the plant balers automatically from any bunker.

The equipment upgrades include two new (larger) balers, split paper screens, a triple-deck cardboard screen, an improved eddy current and vacuum separation system (for aluminum), and a new cross-belt magnet (steel cans).

Last month, GreenWaste Recovery opened a new materials recovery facility at its San Jose, California facility.

Environment + Energy Leader