D&M Waste Management, which started in 2001 as a bulk waste transport business, with current General Manager, Daniel Taylor, taking over in 2012, utilises Genox equipment in its plant. The business has since evolved to become a player in the waste management industry and has more recently made the move into the recycling arena.
The company has contracts with local government authorities throughout Perth and the North-West for bulk verge waste collection. This includes green and general waste and recyclables.
While the move into plastics recycling was something the company had been considering for a while, it was fast-tracked by the national export ban on waste HDPE plastics in 2021. The ban coincided with the launch of the federal government’s Recycling Modernisation Fund. This funded a part of the Genox recycling plant that was purchased.
“We were grateful for the financial support from the Department of Water and Environmental Regulation, which allowed us to enter the recycling market quicker than we anticipated,” Taylor said.
The Genox brand has been distributed and supported by Applied Machinery since its entry into the Australian market. Today, more than 300 companies in Australia have Genox equipment.
Taylor contacted Applied Machinery to see what options they had to build a plant to specifically handle pipe shredding. Once a proposal was received Taylor and his team looked carefully into other companies’ experiences with Genox and Polystar.
“We contacted a couple of recycling businesses that were already operating this brand of equipment and the feedback was extremely favourable and gave us the reassurance to proceed with the purchase,” Taylor said.
The selected recycling plant consists of a number of standard Genox modular components including a shredder that is specially designed for plastic pipes. The J-Series pipe shredder features a multi-rotor design with long life counter knives ideal for shredding different diameter and sized pipes.
After the pipes are shredded and granulated, they go through a sink float tank and then a friction washer, centrifugal dryer and finally into a hopper for melting. The molten plastic is then re-pelletised to produce clean dry pellets.
The waste plastics are sourced from a number of areas including decommissioned HDPE pipes from old bore fields; pipe that was not suitable for re-use along with old bin lids and various plastic off-cuts from local industry.
In something of an alignment of the planets and a classic case of vertical integration, the move into recycling coincided with an opportunity to partner with sister company Hydra Storm. The company had recently installed a new plastic pipe extrusion line producing a range of HDPE corrugated pipe for stormwater drainage applications. The clean dry rHDPE resin that the Polystar plant produces were ideal for feeding into the Hydra Storm pipe extrusion line, with any excess resin being offered to the market at a discounted rate, compared to imported, virgin HDPE resin.
The plant was running from August 10, 2022; the throughput has gradually increased since that time and the plant is now matching the capacity of the extrusion plant. “With both companies operating from the same facility this entire set-up would have to be one of the best examples of true circular economy processing,” Taylor said.
His experience with Applied was certainly positive. “The whole process from quotation through to delivery was pretty much seamless,” he said. “While we handled installation ourselves, we called upon Applied’s after sales service for help in resolving a couple of minor issues and we found the service excellent. Having local support that we can call upon quickly is important to us and a key component of our decision to partner with Applied,” he said.