ZIXTEL EVOLVES WITH BUNTING’S EDDY CURRENT SEPARATOR

When Zixtel was first founded in 1997, its original purpose was to provide services for data destruction, disposal, recycling, and refining. Zixtel’s evolution began in the midst of the global pandemic in 2020 when the company changed its focus to recycling and began recovering metals from a wide range of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), as well as waste discarded by other recycling companies.

The difficulties arising from the pandemic inspired Zixtel’s management team to focus on its recycling capabilities. The company’s objective was to recycle WEEE and other businesses’ waste products and eliminate or minimize the amount of waste sent to the landfill. End markets were then identified for all recovered materials, including metals and plastic.

Zixtel’s engineering team designed and built a recycling plant, which included a metal separation module from Bunting. The module included a high-intensity drum magnet for separating magnetic materials and an eddy current separator to recover non-ferrous metals.

Early in the plant design process, Zixtel identified the necessity of tight particle size control for optimum separation. In the plant, materials initially pass through shredders to liberate recoverable materials. The shredded material then passes up a conveyor and under a Bunting permanent overband magnet positioned in line over the head pulley. Larger ferrous metals are lifted from the conveyor and discarded into a designated collection area. The remaining mix of non-ferrous metal and non-metallics feeds via a conveyor onto the primary vibratory feeder of the metal separation module.

The vibratory feeder spreads the product mix across the whole 1 m width and onto the rotating shell of a high-intensity rare earth drum magnet. Magnetic metals are removed, leaving a mix of non-ferrous metals and non-metallics to fall onto a second vibratory feeder, which evenly delivers the material onto the belt of an eddy current separator.

The eddy current separator is a conveyor system with a head pulley with a high-strength magnetic rotor spinning at high speeds within a non-metallic shell. As the belt conveys material into the changing magnetic field, non-ferrous metals become charged with eddy currents, causing a reaction that propels the particle out of the product stream. This enables the recovery of valuable aluminum, copper, zinc, and other non-ferrous metals. The non-ferrous metal fraction is further processed for concentration into individual metal fractions.

Presently, Zixtel is processing between 4 and 6 tph of material through the metal separation module, with the aim of increasing this to 10 tph.

With the existing process, Zixtel presently handles in excess of 50 different product streams. The material output of the plant is 70 percent metal, 25 percent printed circuit boards and plastics, 5 percent destined for an energy-to-waste plant, and zero percent to landfill.

Since 2020, the recycling plant has evolved with additional particle size reduction and separation stages, including granulators, air separators, and optical sorting. There are plans for additional process plants to recycle specific waste materials.

“We have been fortunate enough to be part of the development of an incredible recycling success story,” says Tom Higginbottom, Bunting’s sales engineer. “Zixtel continually pushes the separation capabilities of our eddy current separator to the maximum and we continue to work with them by testing new waste fractions on our metal separators at our recycling test centre in Redditch.”