Over in Belrose, 19km north east of Sydney, Benedict operates two processing plants, one that sorts mixed waste, and the other that crushes and screens brick and concrete that come out of the sorting plant. The recycled materials are then used to make aggregate and bedding sand. Some six to nine months ago, Benedict upgraded its sorting plant capacity due to increasing demand, which meant more concrete and brick were being produced.

“We’ve increased the processing capability of our sorting plant by well over 100%, which means for the proportion of concrete and brick, we’ve probably got 100% more than what we did prior to the upgrade,” Benedict Industries general manager recycling Ian Collier told Inside Waste. “It became apparent that our crushing plant, which was very old, was the bottleneck and we had to upgrade our crushing plant in order to keep up with the other plant and what it was producing. Because if you fail to do that, what you end up with is stockpiles of waste, which no one wants or likes.”

When it comes to C&D recycling, these bottlenecks are caused by fines and their removal is key to improving C&D recovery targets as well as cost savings.  And the Belrose site had an added disadvantage in that the region gets an inordinate amount of rainfall which causes the material to become sticky and gluey, further hindering the screening process. FOCUS enviro is the Australian distributor of M&K materials handling equipment and it worked with Benedict on an appropriate solution.  The company’s director, Robbie McKernan, explained the importance of efficiently screening fines from C&D waste.

“Today’s aftermarkets for fines to be extracted from C&D material have become extremely high in standard and there are demands for a very specific and small fraction size. This fraction size is very difficult and inefficient to achieve with conventional screening methods particularly when the material is wet or from a high clay-based source,” McKernan said. Fines and capacity aside, Benedict also wanted to future-proof its Belrose operations, anticipating future expansion that may indirectly come out of the EPA’s proposed C&D legislation (see Related Articles).

“What the upgrade is all about is enabling us to deal with our current waste volumes. But in the future, this could be related to the upcoming EPA legislation where the regulator is looking to set minimum resource recovery thresholds to stop token recycling. This is where someone picks the easy, low hanging fruit from a pile of mixed waste and they might pick large pieces of concrete and brick and steel and then the rest gets rammed into a truck and goes away for disposal or heads north,” Collier said.

“We don’t support that and it’s not legitimate recycling. If the EPA brings in this legislation with minimum resource recovery targets, I think the likes of Benedict and others that have invested lots of money in processing equipment will see a lot more waste coming our way. Unless we’ve geared our processing capability for some future expansion, we won’t be able to cope with that.”