Glass crushing at city council recycling centre

Lincom Group, the Powerscreen dealer for Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, have delivered and installed a successful crushing and screening solution to Lismore City Council, a local government area in New South Wales, Australia.  Northern Rivers Waste and Recycling is the waste operations arm of Lismore City Council.

Lismore Council boasts a strong track record in recycling. It is home to one of the largest recycling centres in Australia and the depot is at the forefront of a large scale operation that takes in and deals with, metals, woods, papers, plastics and glass.

The solution provided by Lincom was a Powerscreen Chieftain 1400 incline screen and a Powerscreen XV350 vertical shaft impactor which are giving the customer exactly the specification of end product required. According to Stephen Watterson, Lincom CEO “Northern Rivers Waste and Recycling are very excited by the fact they are now able to further process a material that previously was a waste product destined for landfill. The crushing and screening plant allow the team there to further break it down to create three very usable end products including glass sand material that is in very high demand. They are selling the 4mm minus glass sand as quickly as it is produced – it’s a win win.”

Powerscreen Regional Manager Mark Ferguson has said of the installation, “Davey McDermott has worked closely with this customer to provide an excellent solution that not only works from a financial point of view but more importantly delivers on an environmental level. More and more we encourage customers to rethink sending waste to landfill and recycle as much as possible. Lismore City Council are trailblazing on this front and Powerscreen has been happy to have been involved in the project.”

The feed material for the mobile crushing/screening plant is the by-product which falls off a conveyor at the end of the recycling process. Feed size is approx. 100mm minus and contains numerous materials, including plastics and glass. During the process, the glass gets broken creating fines. This glass and glass fines are the key materials as the council wanted to crush it down to produce a fine minus 4mm end product to be used in the following applications:

Roadbase – Fines added to quarry crushed road-base to bring up the bottom end fines

Pipe-Laying Sand – The minus 4mm glass fines is soft and perfect for a base on which to lay pipe and cable

Sand-Blasting Sand – The fine glass sand can be used as a sand-blasting sand

Machine Configurations

The Chieftain 1400 is fitted with 50mm mesh on the top deck with no bottom deck fitted. The 50mm+ oversize material consists of woods, plastics, metals etc. The 50mm minus material is then fed into a Powerscreen XV350 VSI, fitted with a Terex Canica 2050 Heavy Duty four port rotor and rock shelf. The crushed material then feeds another Incline screen fitted with 40mm on the top deck and 4mm piano wire on the bottom deck.