Durable goods recycler Butler-MacDonald Inc. plans to beef up its plastics capability and shed some metal recycling assets.
The Indianapolis firm plans to purchase equipment to debottleneck its plastics operations and add a separation cell that will double its processing capacity and improve efficiency, said plastics director Ray Pomerleau.
The redesign should be complete by June and will not disrupt existing operations, he said. The company also does toll work, sorting commingled plastics using a variety of separation technologies: size reduction, aspiration, density, optical and electrostatic.
``We're increasing our capacity in density and compressing the footprint of all the processes and interconnecting them to take a lot of handling out of the process,'' he said. ``It cuts some of the labor output.''
The firm plans to auction bulky equipment it used to process metal-heavy product streams. Butler-MacDonald said the auction, set for April 25, will help fund about $350,000 in retooling work.
The sale also will allow the firm to scale back from 151,000 square feet to 80,000 square feet, Pomerleau said. The firm will remain at its existing facility.
Butler-MacDonald has not processed streams with high volumes of metals for about three years, Pomerleau said. The firm still can handle feed streams with metals, but increasingly has been oriented toward plastics, he said.
The company's business has been growing, Pomerleau said. Butler-MacDonald does not disclose sales, but he said the firm recently added a third shift and now employs 35.