Recycling is the Answer

Connecticut’s Murphy Road Recycling adds new processing facility in Stratford

By William Turley, Associate Publisher & Editor

For more than 15 years, F&G Recycling has been recycling C&D materials in Connecticut. It’s all part of a large, privately held network of 14 facilities throughout the state, most of which process or transfer C&D, but also handle MSW and recyclables. Some of the names the company operates under are USA Hauling and Recycling, F&G recycling, (which has been a CMRA member for more than 10 years), Murphy Road Recycling and All American Waste. The company also has an extensive hauling capacity throughout the region.

Its newest addition is a mixed C&D processing facility in Stratford, Conn. Murphy Road Recycling, LLC purchased the site in September 2008 and since then, has completed major renovations at the site including new siding and roofing, repaving the entire yard, fencing the yard, and installing two new scales and a scalehouse and CBI C&D processing system. A 6,000 square foot addition will be completed in September.

Operating under the Murphy Road Recycling banner, the site is permitted to accept up to 375 tons of material a day inclusive of C&D, recyclables and commercial and industrial waste. When acquired, the site was permitted to accept less C&D and more source-separated recycling, but since the company had a nearby recycling facility, it was able to increase the C&D tonnage by diverting the recycling to the nearby site. “We did some modifications to the existing permit and shifted some of the tonnage around. At this point we do not have a plan to grow the site’s capacity—that level is good for in that market right now,” said Jonathan Murray, director of operations.

There is other C&D processing capacity in the market around Stratford, but the company felt it needed to add its own operation in that area of the state. “Our own trucks were picking up C&D and our customers were coming onto the site and we were just transferring the material out to our other facilities,” said Murray. “We felt there was a need to be able to process the C&D coming in, and to recover the recyclable material at this site.”

Processing
Material is tipped on a concrete floor from trucks that have entered one of the processing building’s three bay doors. The material is fed with a Komatsu PC 160 excavator with a thumb and bucket attachment into a HD 10 cu-yd CBI manufactured feed hopper. It travels up an incline belt where if falls onto a 30-ft long x 60-inch wide Action Taper-Slot screen. The Action screen is a harmonically balanced screen with a wedge lock system that prevents material from driving its way through the taper slot (finger) and contaminating the material below.

The screen takes an 8-inch cut out and the oversize material further onto the picking table on an A line. The picking table is a 60-inch-wide x 80-ft picking table sorting out aggregate, cardboard and other paper, plastics and metal.

On the B line, the 8-inch minus material travels outside the building and goes into a CBI designed 30-ft long fully enclosed trommel screen. The trommel takes out 1-inch fines before re-entering the building.

When in the building, the material goes into a model 6030 Action Dense Out system that separates the heavies from light material using a fluidized air bed that lifts the material onto a belt moving forward as the heavy material drops below. There is a dedicated 24-inch belt to separate non-ferrous/ferrous metals from the aggregate material most commonly found on the belt. Some hand sorting takes place after that. There are two overhead magnets on the B line.

The wood, both from both the A and B lines, are sorted by a conveyance system designed under the mezzanine. This conveyance system enables the system to direct sorted wood to go in two different directions, or for all of the wood to go in one direction. In this case, all sorted wood loads on to a common belt where it loads into a feed hopper of a CBI 8600 grinder.

The 8600 is a stationary grinder with 400 hp. It has the ability to be direct fed into a 16-ft feed hopper, or have the material from the sorting line feed into grinder. The 8600 has been set to make a 2-inch minus material and can either be discharged into a holding bin, or routed to a secondary 3648 CBI stationary hog. The hog as a secondary grind is making a 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 inch minus.

According to Murray, the wood is primarily being made into two types of fuel product. One is a common boiler fuel. Another is a clean wood product for the wood pellet industry, both industrial and residential. That wood first passes through the 8600 for a coarse grind, then to get it to a size for the pellet market it passes through the 3648 grinder to take it down to 1 inch minus. Murray said the company has a couple of pellet outlets, and “as long as it is clean they are having no problem with it.”

Plainfield Renewable Energy is a biomass boiler trying to come online in Connecticut. It reportedly has all of its permits, but has not begun construction. That will provide all C&D recyclers in the area a steady market outlet. Like all C&D recyclers, any good news on wood markets is a help. “We are always working our wood markets, taking it to anywhere we can find. We can move the wood, but it’s not easy to move,” said Murray.

Plastics, especially PVCs, are always a challenge, but Murphy Road Recycling has an outlet for hard plastics, buckets and the like.

C&D fines are another large end product that takes a lot of work to find a home for. Murray said the site does have an end market for the fines as an alternative daily cover, but is looking for more reliable, steady and added-value markets. The company is involved with a pilot project for composting the fines to blend I with leaf and yard waste, and other feed stocks. “The state is supporting us on this project,” said Murray. “We will do a bunch of blends and what we can come up with for products. But the fines are such a large part of our end products. It is a shame they are not being used more.”

Even though the company has been recycling C&D since the 1990s, it still faces the age-old problem all recyclers do. “We need to have more markets to choose from,” said Murray. “Wood and C&D fines first.”

Despite that, will the company continue to expand in C&D recycling? “We have been doing this recycling since the early 1990s, and we keep adding facilities. We are looking at adding additional C&D processing, including shingle recycling here in Stratford. We currently recycle shingles and sheet rock at other locations in Connecticut and would like to add it to Stratford. Finding asphalt mix producers to accept the processed shingles in still a challenge. We do move C&D out by rail, but we don’t think that is the answer. Recycling is the answer,” said Murray. “As long as we have markets for the products, we will keep putting the facilities in.”

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