1. Cost: Expenditure Items are Investment Items
Investing in a complete municipal waste Sorting system requires comprehensive consideration: minimizing the total cost of ownership over its entire lifecycle and maximizing its incremental revenue. This includes one-time equipment purchase and infrastructure installation costs, as well as long-term operating, energy, and labor costs.
2. Installation Optimization: Transforming Commissioning Cycle into Production Time
Equipment installation is not simply about placing it in place; it is crucial for determining future operational stability.
Professional installation begins with meticulous site planning, ensuring the foundation’s load-bearing capacity meets requirements.
For large waste shredders, a concrete foundation with a thickness of at least 400 mm is typically required, with ample space for maintenance.
Precise calibration after equipment placement is critical.
For example, the coaxiality error between the main unit and the motor shaft must be controlled within 0.05 mm. This is a key technical factor in ensuring long-term stable operation and reducing abnormal wear.
Proper electrical installation is equally important.
The control system should be placed in a dry, well-ventilated area, and all cables must be physically protected. After installation, no-load and loaded material tests must be performed to comprehensively verify equipment performance and ensure stable operation after commissioning.
3. Equipment Efficiency: Processing Speed
The core value of municipal waste sorting and shredding machines lies in their systematic efficiency.
Taking a typical sorting line as an example:
a. Mixed waste is first shredded into materials smaller than 300 mm.
b. The materials are screened by size using a trommel screen, and then magnetic separation removes metals.
c. The undersized material can be further extracted for organic matter for composting, while the oversize material is separated by air separation to obtain light combustibles for incineration power generation, and heavy materials for landfill.
This highly efficient mechanized process directly brings multi-dimensional efficiency improvements. It is not only reflected in the high throughput of several to tens of tons of waste per hour per machine.
More importantly, it can increase the purity of mixed plastic sorting from approximately 80% by manual methods to over 95%. Increased purity directly translates into higher selling prices, with each ton potentially increasing by hundreds to thousands of yuan, becoming the core source of revenue.
4. Profitability: Earnings and Return Cycle
One case study shows that a single sorting line can help a company reduce its sorting workforce by 20, saving approximately 1.2 million yuan in labor costs annually.
Besides the premium for high-purity plastics, intelligent sorting can also accurately recycle high-value materials that are difficult to separate using traditional methods, such as specific types of high-quality plastics (HDPE, ABS) and non-ferrous metals.
Overall, the payback period for a medium-sized sorting project is typically 2 to 4 years. Considering the equipment’s design life of over 10 years, the long operational period after break-even is all about generating pure profit.
For example, in a case study provided by Zhengzhou Zhongcheng Equipment, a company processing 200 tons of waste daily, generated approximately 3 million yuan in incremental benefits annually after introducing an intelligent sorting line, by saving labor, increasing the value of recyclables, and discovering new materials.