There have been some major improvements at the Springhill Construction and Demolition Recycling Plant. Most importantly, the new picking station has doubled in size and a new waste classifier built by Carmac has been added. In addition, a low speed grinder has been added to increase production while significantly reducing costs and a third magnet installed to ensure that wood products are free of metal contamination.

New Springhill Recycling Plant
According to Site Foreman Jason Wagner, the new picking station is very popular with the plant workers. The prefabricated climate controlled building provides workers with an improved working environment. The expanded plant now has eight picking stations.

The Carmac waste classifier came all the way from Ireland. This big orange tunnel is designed to remove lites, such as paper, plastic and cardboard in order to increase our recycle percentage and production. It is fed by a trommel that has been designed and modified by Tomlinsons for C&D separation with punch plates to separate product.

Over the years, there has been a lot of hard work and hands on effort by many people. There have been many years of fiddling to get it right by moving a fan here, a belt there, or adding a magnet somewhere.

The new custom built plant enables Tomlinsons to increase productivity, process more products through the plant, and hopefully see last years 71% diversion rate increase to 80%. That’s certainly good news for the environment and the City of Ottawa.

How do they do that?

• A shovel feeds waste into an 830 trommel.
• The trommel screens out the fines (used for cover material at the landfill site).
• It passes through the waste classifier, where the lite fraction material (plastics, cardboard and paper) is removed from the waste stream.
• It crosses through the picking station where the wood is hand picked for quality assurance, any oversize or unrecycleable waste is removed before passing through the magnets to remove the scrap metal.
• The material then passes through an air blower to remove any other unrecycleable materials.
• What is left is only rock and rubble that is crushed into a 3 inch minus product, with one final pass through a magnet to remove any steel.
• The wood is crushed for either horticulture or boiler material.
• Steel which is removed either at the picking station or by the series of magnets is sent off-site and recycled.