STORY-TRÅD·industri

Automated bale dewiring cuts shredder blade maintenance in half

In Ontario, bales of used beverage bottles arrive at Blue Mountain Plastics by the truckload, compressed into dense blocks and bound with steel wire. The facility runs a closed-loop recycling operation: plastic bottles go in, and 100 percent recycled PET for new bottles comes out. Blue Mountain Plastics processes millions of pounds of material a year. At that scale, small inefficiencies add up fast. Manually dewiring bales was slowing things down, so the company turned to automation. The cost of manual wire removal Before automation, operators fed PET bales directly into the shredder with a clamp truck. Wires that reached the shredder caused problems. They made the infeed unpredictable, wore down the shredder blades, and required manual intervention. Cutting the wires by hand was also slow and dangerous. Each wire had to be cut individually, and a compressed bale can expand suddenly once the tension is released. Workers had to pull the loose wires from the bale by hand, gather them, and carry them to a container. Staffing made the problem harder. Labour was becoming increasingly scarce, while manual wire cutting created safety risks and slowed the process. Automating the first step Blue Mountain Plastics turned to Finnish technology company Cross Wrap, which develops automated systems for removing wire from bales. The company supplied two fully automatic Bale Dewiring machines, along with feeding conveyors, adapted for the heavier, denser North American bale format. The machines remove the wires in a single automated pass before the material reaches the shredder. Cross Wrap's horizontal system works from both sides of the bale, with grippers securing the wires on one side while cutters on the other slice through them. The system then coils the removed wire into compact bundles. The cutters can be configured for different materials and bale types, helping ensure consistent performance.