Skala Australasia, a specialist in bulk materials handling and vibratory process equipment, has been appointed as the exclusive distributor across Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands of heavy duty and severe duty plant and equipment for Northern Ireland-based BlueMAC Manufacturing.
BlueMAC, which is a joint venture between UK plant and equipment manufacturers Blue Group and DMAC Engineering, fabricates and design engineers complete plant and equipment for the processing of construction and demolition (C&D), commercial and industrial waste (C&I), and municipal solid waste (MSW) streams. In Ireland, BlueMAC’s plant solutions are ideal for fines clean-up in recycled concrete building materials.
Skala, which was formed in 2012 and recently celebrated four years in operation, is the Australian distributor of General Kinematics heavy duty and severe duty density separators, screens and feeders, MATEC dewatering and filter press systems, Spaleck flip-flow screens, Masaba radial and telescopic conveyors and BRT Hartner recycling systems. Skala also assists customers with equipment selection and design, installation, commissioning and in-service maintenance of plant and equipment. Skala’s customers to date have been in the mining and recycled aggregates sectors but some of its products are starting to attract the attention of quarry operators in Australia.
Some of the BlueMac equipment that will now be available to the Australian market will include all-metal separator and density separators, which are used for cleaning up aggregates, trommel screens, hopper feeders, and conveyors.
‘A perfect fit’
The foundations for the alliance were established in late 2015, when Skala began working with BlueMac in an informal capacity on several projects. The New South Wales-based company had been seeking a specialist manufacturing partner that could deliver large recycling solutions after finding that its customers’ inquiries were increasing in size and complexity.
“We met BlueMAC in September and October last year,” Skala’s managing director Simon Toal said. “There was a couple of products that we were interested in at the time. One was the all-metal separator, so we started dealing with BlueMAC specifically for access to that product, as it was one our customers didn’t have. Concurrent with that, we’ve also designed and built some full recycling systems ourselves in Australia. They’ve been very bespoke, individually engineered projects, and then we’ve gone out to market and individually procured the components and delivered them more like an EPCM. That’s been very time-consuming for us and not cost-competitive for our clients. That’s how we came to understand BlueMAC more and what its full capability was. BlueMAC does a complete integration of individual components and complete systems.”
Toal added that Skala and BlueMAC began to submit combined tenders for work at the end of 2015, with BlueMAC focusing on the design, fabrication and installation, and Skala sourcing the components that it is a dealer for in Australia. After securing a number of projects in early 2016, the two parties agreed that the best path forward was for Skala to become the new Australasian distributor of BlueMAC’s integrated solutions. Further BlueMAC had already completed a number of installations with many brands of plant and equipment that Skala already represented, eg General Kinematics (GK), Spaleck.
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“The fit seemed perfect,” Toal said. “The beauty of BlueMAC is that their plants globally utilise those brands as well. Their engineering processes and systems already are equipped with the end brands that we represent.”
BlueMac is already in the process of building two plants for a Skala customer, which will be two of the largest construction and demolition processing facilities in Australia. Although Toal could not disclose a name, he indicated that the client was a major NSW waste company. He added that the plants would be “highly automated” and incorporate equipment from other Skala brands, such as General Kinematics feeders and destoners”.
Toal said the first of the plants, which will be located in Western Sydney, should be active by September this year, with the second to come online in December. The footprints of both C&D processing plants will be 140m long by 50m wide, and they are expected to process in excess of 150 tonnes per hour of just about any C&D and/or C&I waste application.
“The C&D plant will start with processing pieces of inferior material that could be a metre by a metre,” Toal said. “Huge chunks of recycled concretes, timber poles, metal, soil aggregates, plastics, light papers, any size of C&D waste, could follow. Out of those we would separate timber, processed timber, ferrous metals, non-ferrous metals, light plastics, heavy plastics, rubble. On the aggregates/concrete side, it should be able to produce a -6mm or -8mm clean soil, followed by a 6mm to 25mm aggregate product, then a 50mm to 150mm +150mm rubble.”
Robotics and automation
The two recycling plants will, for the most part, be automated, although they will still require some manual labour on picking stations to ensure that various contaminants do not become mixed in with specific waste streams. Toal predicted that, though, is likely to change in the coming years.
“The next step for us is we’re exploring the use of robotics to minimise labour on this plant and most BlueMAC plants that have been installed still have an element of manual labour,” Toal said. “With the equipment that we’ve put on this C&D plant, we’ve reduced that quite a bit from some in the past. There still is manual picking quality control on this system and the challenge for us on next generation models is to introduce robotics to replace manual labour.”
Indeed, in March this year, Blue Group and ZenRobotics announced a distribution agreement for the UK of the latter’s ZenRobotics Recycler (ZRR, designed by BlueMAC) that will be incorporated into Blue Group plants. With two robot arms, the device will be able to make up to 4000 picks an hour – twice the output of a human operative. The ZRR has been designed to recognise and recover mixed waste such as metal, timber, stone, cardboard, and rigid plastic portions from mixed C&D and C&I streams.
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“The technology has come a long way in four years,” Toal said. “It’s come forward at a rapid rate of knots. BlueMAC have done two or three projects in the UK with robotic picking stations and we are actually designing them into another plant for one of our customers at the moment. These plants aren’t as big in tonnes per hour but they will mark the next generation of automation.”
Nevertheless, even without the aid of the ZRR, the plants are becoming more intuitive and will require minimal supervision. As Toal himself acknowledged, the main reason Skala turned to BlueMAC as a partner was because it could not alone fulfil its customers’ requirements for more complex and automated systems. “In the past, customers were happy to buy an individual piece of equipment and try to integrate it themselves into their plant. What they’re finding now is a lot of these processes are becoming more automated, and components need the logic to speak to each other. They need to sense what load is on the conveyor belt so that it can speed up or slow down to enable increased efficiency or picking or sorting. If you have a really thick bed depth, that needs to be sensed and slowed down. There’s a process flow logic in place.
“I guess the customer is getting more mature and demanding in the efficiency of the products and some of them are looking at taking on C&D waste and other waste streams to diversify the business. Some of the medium-size operators may only be able to run a plant on C&D waste, for say, three days a week, so if they can bring in another waste stream such as MSW or C&I, then they can keep their equipment running at a higher duty, at a higher rate. That’s the two complexities there, that we’re getting customers that realise that it’s not simply a matter of buying an off-the-shelf piece of equipment and trying to integrate it themselves, it distracts them from their core business. A customer looks to us for a complete turnkey solution of systems that address their demands.”
Independent requirements
Even if average medium-size quarrying or recycling operators do not want plants that are almost autonomous, there is still scope for them to purchase some of Skala’s and BlueMAC’s plant and equipment separately rather than the “full package deal”.
“Although we offer the complete solution, it’s not unusual for customers to request an individual component,” Toal said. “BlueMAC do a number of mobile pieces of equipment. The all-metal separator is a track-mounted individual machine, similarly with their trommel screens and hopper feeders. We’ve been looking at selling the GK density separators to some of the multinational companies as mobile units, so they can use them on multiple sites. All our machines can make up a complete system but they can work independently too.”
While you would expect most of Skala and BlueMAC’s offerings to be more specific to the recycling industry, Toal indicated that some of the larger quarry operators had shown interest in Skala’s larger two-mass screens.
“We’ve had some quarry customers inspect the GK screens,” he continued. “The beauty of the equipment is that it structurally uses about one-seventh of the structural forces of a typical brute force screen. The major difference with the GK screens that we will be installing in the BlueMAC plants in Sydney is they will be two-mass banana screens that use about one-third of the power and about one-seventh of the structural forces. They will be considerably more reliable and efficient, which is increasingly attractive to some of our customers, particularly if they are doing a retrofit for a plant that’s up high in the air. It’s the same equipment we’ve put into major mine sites and it’s suited to larger quarries.
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“We’re not necessarily cost-competitive for smaller quarry operations,” Toal added, “because a two-mass machine is an inherently heavier, more expensive, more elaborate design. However, when your operation starts getting into the larger tonnes per hour – like we do with these screens that can generate up to 4000 tph – that’s where the cost-benefits really come into play and the savings and efficiencies are worthwhile. So most of the BlueMAC GK equipment is the standard range of plant but by and large we’re a bespoke manufacturer who will customise for individual applications.”
General Kinematics’ STM screens may also have applications for the sand processing side of the business. Toal suggested that as sand grades continue to diminish and the quality of virgin sand material declines, so density separators could play an invaluable part in clearing impurities and other organics from sand deposits. The STM screen, aka the “megascreen”, which is built to maximum dimensions of 6m wide by 10m long, is intended for mining applications in Australia but according to Toal has also attracted the interest of potential quarry customers because it has the capacity to separate and process two different products down both sides of the same screen separated by a spline. This potentially makes the STM more efficient and flexible than multiple screens, for example.
“There’s definitely been a lot of interest from some quarries in that large megascreen,” Toal said. “We’ve sold them to the big miners recently but we never really expected there would be much interest from quarries. However, I guess quarries, like every house, are getting bigger and bigger and there are requirements to become more efficient. When there’s a product that is offering bigger sizes in tonnes per hour whilst only using a seventh of the structural stresses on the machine, that really puts us back in the box to be competitive for heavy duty and very large screens.”
Skala Australasia is headquartered in Newcastle, NSW, with fully stocked warehouses in Newcastle and in Perth, Western Australia. The company also has equipment and other support services in every state barring Tasmania and in regional areas such as Karratha, Geelong and far north Queensland.