A Massachusetts company is installing new equipment that will allow for greater separation of recycled resin.
Aaron Industries Corp. of Leominster is now using optical sortation on both post-consumer and post-industrial resin, allowing the recycler and compounder to provide more color possibilities for the company's products.
Using optical technology gives Aaron the ability to better segregate mixed colored plastics that come in from other recyclers. And this better separation, in turn, creates an opportunity to produce a wider range of color possibilities.
"We brought in technology to allow us to try to better segregate materials up front. So when we get the regrind, the parts in or regrind plastic ... it allows us to better segregate by color," Vice President Todd Marchand said.
Prior to the upgraded sortation, the company offered a majority of its output in black or gray, a result of mixing different colors together in the recycling process.
"By being able to optically sort it, it allows us to make some different hues of colors," he said. "It does allow us to take mixed color and make the perfect natural out of it or perfect white."
Aaron often sources used plastics from other recyclers who previously have done some type of separation and preparation. Introduction of optical sortation allows the company to build upon that work.
Creating new and more accurate separation allows the company to create a much wider spectrum of colors such as red, blue, green, yellow, orange and white.
"We buy different feed streams in vast forms, but essentially when it comes to our facility, it's going to be in a regrind form. And what we do is we add the value by custom blending [and] custom formulating those regrinds to make certain properties," Marchand said.
Output is either 100 percent recycled content or a mixture of recycled and virgin resin depending on customer needs.
Producing black or gray recycled resin is fine for many applications, but Marchand said adding an ability to create other colors opens up additional business opportunities. "A lot of customer applications, the customer wants to find a way to get it to a different color,' he said. "It's just a way for us to try to help our customer base."
Markets for the company include housewares, foodservice, consumer packaging, agricultural and automotive. Polypropylene is the company's largest resin, followed by polystyrene and high density polyethylene, Marchand said.
The company operates out of a 100,000-square-foot production location and has an additional 90,000 square feet of warehouse space.