First Star Recycling

to get a baler or other means to process their discards and send it directly to the end mar- kets. The material never comes to us. We’d like to expand in that area in the future.” In the technology realm, FirstStar recently installed two optical sorters which have the capability of identifying everything that comes down the conveyor. The first has a program to pull off water and soda bottles, and anything made of PET polyethylene terephthalate; and the second is programmed to take out milk bottles, shampoo bottles, laundry detergent bottles, and anything made of HDPE high density polyethylene. These two optical sorters do a lot of the work that used to be done by hand. “We were actually one of the first MRFs in the country to trial the use of a robot,” says Gubbels, “In fact, we were so early on with it, the company Amp Robotics, out of Colorado, had just started developing the system and they were very grateful of the work we put in to help them figure out how to do it. With our new container line, we’re talking to them again – now that they’ve greatly perfected their ini- tial version, we’re looking at the possibility of R RECYCLING