Paul van Trotsenburg, Test Center Manager at Van Dyk Recycling Solutions, answers some common questions about the company鈥檚 full-scale testing facility.
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What was the vision behind investing in a facility of this scale, and how has that size translated into a competitive advantage for your customers?
Van Dyk鈥檚 test facility was purpose-built around one core mission: customer success. For us, success is when we validate new material streams, new processes, and new technologies to make customers more profitable. This is the largest recycling test facility in the world and the only one of its kind at this scale. The size gives us the capacity to run extensive, uninterrupted trials that truly mirror real world MRF conditions as opposed to running small batches of materials on demo-scale machines.
听How does a customer go from test concept to walking away with actionable data?
We spend a lot of time working with customers to identify and understand their testing goals. Once we have the objectives set, we can lay out a test plan to achieve those goals. Materials are then shipped and prepared by our skilled team beforehand to make the time on-site as productive as possible for the customer. Our optical sorters are optimized to sort at the highest rate possible, giving us data on what the current technology can achieve. During a test, we may also adapt our test plan to live learnings and data, which is a key reason we encourage our partners to attend these tests in person. Ultimately, customers walk away with concrete purity, recovery, and throughput rates giving them a comprehensive picture of what real system performance would look like on their material. Those metrics are often used in follow-up discussions with our dedicated process engineers, who go about designing a system or retrofit that can match the performance demonstrated in our test.
How has this model changed the way MRF operators approach equipment investment decisions?
It has greatly changed the way companies make investment decisions. While there are many new projects that require testing evaluation, it is actually more common to test material for facilities wanting to retrofit in new equipment to recover more material. However, like any large capital investment, those projects must first be grounded in a sound business case. To help prove the case, Van Dyk can test a sample of materials from the customer鈥檚 own site to quantify what the results will be if they choose to partner with us. Seeing the results firsthand, customers can confidently move forward with an investment decision. In some cases, we can use our large testing grounds to try different iterations of designs to settle on a final process for a customer鈥檚 project goals.
What are some of the most popular tests run at the test center?
The most common types of tests we do are composition analyses and recovery tests on missed materials. Essentially, our customers want to understand what is in their residue and how much of those recoverables they can realistically capture. As the industry has adopted the technology for simpler use cases, our test facility has adapted to testing more niche applications. For instance, customers might not want to test an optical for sorting PET, but we might have customers looking to separate PET trays or food vs. non-food grade PET, which are relatively newer applications for our industry. In that way, as our customers look to push the boundaries, we鈥檙e right there with them developing novel sorting methods to make them more successful.
We also regularly work with consumer goods brands and manufacturers to test their packaging according to different sortation standards. These results are invaluable as EPR laws are enacted across North America. Our data helps inform packaging design and recyclability claims, which leads to higher recycling and capture rates of packaging.听
As sustainability regulations tighten, how do you see the role of the test center evolving in guiding industry-wide innovation?
This represents a significant evolution of the facility’s role. Van Dyk鈥檚 Test Center is now used by consumer goods companies that want to test the recoverability of their packaging in the existing MRF environment. We work closely with associations to provide standardized testing methods that can accurately mimic real-world conditions. It’s a powerful feedback loop: better data for brand owners leads to more recyclable packaging, which in turn improves outcomes for MRF operators downstream.
As EPR regulations make their way through statehouses, we are constantly looking for ways to maximize material recovery. We have recently implemented new AI analyzing technology, through our partnership with Greyparrot, to continue testing automated plant controls/operations based on what the analyzers are seeing. We鈥檙e also using these analyzers in our test center to demonstrate how manual auditing can be a thing of the past.
How do you determine which combination of technologies to deploy for a given test?
The machines are set up in loop configurations that can be customized to mimic a MRF鈥檚 actual process, sending material from one machine to the next. We carefully select which machines we鈥檒l use for a test by examining the input material鈥檚 composition, density, size distribution, and contamination levels. For instance, if we are sorting very small material (<2鈥�), we would opt for a machine that has a small nozzle pitch (distance between valves) to make sure we don鈥檛 miss materials when ejecting them.听
What new technologies are available in the test center?
We have several recent equipment updates from various Van Dyk equipment partners. Three Greyparrot Analyzers are available on one of our test loops, bringing the best-in-class AI vision system to analyze our customers material streams. We routinely use these analyzers to demonstrate the power of real-time data in plant operations. Recently, we鈥檝e also retrofitted in Lubo Recycling Solutions鈥� new Optisort optical sorter package, giving us the ability to run higher throughput tests on fiber and flexible packaging streams.
We have a very exciting few months ahead as we look forward to integrating a TOMRA Innosort flake sorting system into our space. This system is designed to sort flakes by polymer and color at high throughputs and high purity and recovery rates.