Efficient recycling with TUKWIND
Three companies - Ing. Teubel Umwelttechnik, Johannes Duscher and Scheuch COMPONENTS - worked together to develop the "TUKWIND" series of wind classifiers.Compost can be used as a replacement for artificial fertilizer and peaty soil in order to conserve resources, protect our climate and improve the soil conditions. The soil’s humus content plays a key role in the storage of CO2 and also increases the soil’s resistance to environmental stress (dry periods, floods, erosion, etc.).
Compost quality has dropped continuously in recent years due to foreign substances (glass, PET bottles, plastics, various fabrics, etc.) being carelessly disposed of with organic waste. Foreign substance contamination of organic waste is getting out of hand and the conventional technical and/or manual separation methods are no longer capable of reducing the foreign substance content sufficiently. As a result, plastics and other impurities are getting onto our farmland – in Austria, several hundred tons of plastic are introduced into the soil every year via compost.
The organic waste industry is naturally anxious to find sensible and economically viable means of improving compost quality. As well as raising awareness among the public in order to improve the input quality, technical methods are being employed within the individual process steps to separate out the foreign substances effectively.
Many businesses, particularly smaller ones, cannot afford expensive investments in this area. That’s why Ing. Teubel Umwelttechnik, Johannes Duscher and Scheuch COMPONENTS decided to worked together to develop the “TUKWIND” series of wind classifiers.
The three companies developed highly efficient solutions in various performance classes and combinations (e.g. Basic, Pro) which can be marketed at attractive prices, even for smaller businesses. The wind classifiers produced in this collaborative project can be fitted or retrofitted on existing stationary or mobile sifting machines.
Experience has shown that, even if there are hardly any visible impurities in the compost, considerable quantities can be removed when the compost is sifted using a TUKWIND wind classifier. When cleaning sewage sludge compost, in addition to separating out small pieces of plastic, it is also possible to remove huge quantities of non-siftable cords which probably come from the disintegrated remnants of sanitary hygiene items in the sludge.
In order to evaluate the quantities of lightweight materials in the sewage sludge compost after sifting in a double-drum screen, Teubel Umwelttechnik looked at a feed quantity of 20 m³ of fresh compost. The TUKWIND PRO wind classifier, which was developed in collaboration with Scheuch COMPONENTS, was used for this purpose. Using the wind classifier, a total of 0.3 m³ of lightweight materials were removed from the apparently clean 20 m³ of compost. That corresponds to a contamination proportion of > 1.5 vol%!
