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At Sunshine Groupe, we believe in sustainability — which is why we’ve invested in some of the most advanced recycling technology in the world.
Through our partnership with Sustainability Victoria, we’ve installed a material recovery facility (MRF) at our Brooklyn landfill and recovery site. This facility allows us to better identify resources from the 120,000 tonnes per annum of our waste stream that can be repurposed and reused for other materials. A mixture of waste materials will be dropped off at the primary transfer station where it will then be subject to processes to sort the materials into their constituent parts based on physical properties such as particle size, density, and magnetism.
After the waste has been sorted through these processes, the materials will be transferred to our state-of-the-art robotic material sorting plant. Here, the ZRR3 — a tri-station robotic gantry arm plant manufactured by Zen Robotics and supplied by Robots in Waste — will use its high precision sensors and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to sort precise and pure material types from the waste stream. The ZRR3 can sort around 6000 objects from the belt per hour, equating to a plant total of approximately 7–8 tonnes per hour.
The combination of the MRF and the robotics material sorting plant is expected to recover approximately 50% of the entire waste stream — around 60,000 tonnes per annum. Over the first year, recovery rates are expected to increase between 70%–80%.
Sunshine Groupe expects to have the ZRR3 fully operational in early 2017.
When the Brooklyn landfill is filled, the successful operation of the MRF will support the site’s transition into the closest transfer station in Melbourne’s CBD. This will position Sunshine Groupe as one of Melbourne’s primary waste processors.
In addition to the MRF and the robotics material sorting plant, Sunshine Groupe has also invested in a twin-ram baler plant and a wood shredding plant.
The twin-ram baler plant is being installed within the MRF in partnership with Australian Packaging Covenant (APC). The baling press will be a 120-horsepower, hydraulic driven, 90-degree twin-ram Godswill machine provided by Rowland Engineering. This machine can process up to eight tonnes of plastic, paper, and cardboard product per hour and produces approximately cubic meter bales weighing almost one tonne each.
This baling plant will be a key section of the material recovery process at Sunshine Groupe, enabling diversion of packaging materials from the landfill near 10,000 tonnes per annum.
Per recent surveys, there is approximately 40,000 tonnes of timber, per annum, lost to landfill at our site. To combat this wasted timber, Sunshine Groupe has designed and constructed a wood shredding and waste timber processing plant capable of producing chipped timber produced from recovered waste timber sources at a rate of around 15–20 tonnes per hour. At the core of the plant is a Zerma shredder — a slow speed single rotor shredder powered by two 100kW motors — provided by Telford Smith Engineering.
The plant also contains a specialised rotary screen, two over-band permanent magnets, a customer primary vibrating screen, and a custom automatic plant control package supplied by F&I Industries.
Overall, the plant allows Sunshine Groupe to add value to timber that we recover from the incoming waste stream, creating marketable chipped timber products. Further timber will be recovered through the MRF.
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