A material recovery facility lives or dies by sort-line uptime — this is one of the sectors Jonathan’s spent real time in, and the failure patterns are familiar. The lines are built up from equipment out of a dozen different catalogs: infeed conveyors, disc and star screens, trommels, optical sorters doing near-infrared sorts at speed, eddy-current and magnetic separators, and balers on the back end. None of it was necessarily specified to talk to the rest, and a fault on one machine backs up everything upstream of it within minutes.

The faults that actually cost tonnage are rarely dramatic. A jam-detection sensor that’s gone flaky trips the whole line for a five-second problem. A start sequence that isn’t properly interlocked lets a downstream conveyor start into material it can’t clear. Optical sorters drift out of calibration slowly enough that reject rates creep up before anyone questions it. None of these are really single-machine problems. They’re sequencing and interlock problems that happen to show up as a machine fault. We diagnose across brands, get the line back up, then tighten the sequencing, jam detection and visibility so the plant loses fewer minutes per shift. A baler that’s cycling slower than it used to is frequently reporting a hydraulic or mechanical issue rather than a logic fault, and treating it as a controls problem first wastes a service visit that should have started upstream of the panel.

Equipment we work on