WASTE MANAGEMENT IN ACTION – PLASTIC RECYCLING
Plastic priority ENVORINEX MANAGING DIRECTOR JENNY BROWN HAS OPENED TASMANIA’S FIRST SOFT PLASTIC RECYCLING PLANT IN INDUSTRIAL HUB BELL BAY.
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ell Bay is an industrial centre and deep-water port in north Tasmania, best known for its 63-year-old aluminium smelter. The smelter has a production capacity of 178,000 tonnes per year and supports much of the employment in the region. Other residents include mining and metal companies, timber producers and TasPorts. The 2500-hectare bay is Tasmania’s largest industrial precinct. To support the region, Envorinex has opened Tasmania’s first soft plastic recycling plant. The plant will source material from Tasmania’s agriculture, aquaculture, horticulture and industrial industries in an attempt to close the plastic loop and facilitate growth. Envorinex has been operating in Tasmania since Managing Director Jenny Brown purchased the plant and equipment following the closure of SVP Industries in 2009. “Tasmania has a large industrial and
Tasmania’s geography creates makes interstate transportation costly.
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commercial industry sector and the state produces a lot of waste, much of which couldn’t be locally recycled before,” Jenny says. Tasmania’s island geography creates an impost on interstate transportation. Sending waste across the Tasman is expensive, even prohibitively so, and given the lack of market value for soft plastics, largely unsustainable. “We thought it important to work around that reality and develop a solution to the excess,” Jenny says. Supporting the state’s industrial and commercial industries was a driving motivation behind commissioning the new facility. “The Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation is doing a lot of great work in the state to increase the recycling rates and product stewardship of packaging, so we didn’t feel it necessary to get involved in that space,” Jenny says. “There is a lot of industry in this area so we decided to design a plant
to work with that – sourcing from industrial, commercial, aquacultural and horticultural sites and also producing products they can buy.” To turn her idea into reality, Jenny enlisted the help of Applied Machinery, which designed and supplied the plant and equipment, offering Envorinex a complete turnkey proposal. Envorinex and Applied Machinery have worked together for over a decade after Applied Machinery supplied the recycler with a Genox shredder in 2009. Applied Machinery recommended, and eventually supplied, a fully integrated Genox plastic washing system. Jenny says the plant is designed to recover rigid and flexible plastics, including those with high contamination levels. “The plant design is modular, meaning we could configure the setup and individual components based on our specific application needs,” Jenny says. It includes a four-stage washing system with a pre-washer, floatsink washing tanks and horizontal friction washer. Additionally, Applied Machinery sourced a centrifugal dryer, film press and trommel screen. The Genox washing plant is suited to post-consumer and industrial products, facilitating the production of high purity and low moisture flakes and pellets for sale or reprocessing. “Applied Machinery were really great to work with. They even took us to the Genox manufacturing plant in Guangzhou China to source specific
