The new wash plant will produce 170,000 tonnes of recycled aggregates each year for the construction industry in the North West of England and across the UK.
Founded in 1958, The Ruttle Group began by renting agricultural equipment to the farming community before extending its operations to earth moving, excavating, civil engineering and landscape work. The investment signifies a further expansion by the company and the growth of its recycling and aggregates division.
Traditionally, Ruttle had segregated and stockpiled incoming inert material from construction sites in and around the Chorley area, or crushed and screened it for low-grade use. Ensuring consistency in output materials was a challenge, and with incoming volumes of remediated soils rising, the company saw the opportunity to supply the market with a higher quality of washed and recycled sands, gravels and soils.
The original methods, while adequate, were limiting the reuse potential of both the outputs and the company. In their drive to enhance the company’s product offering, Ruttle partnered with Northern Ireland-based wet processing company CDE to develop a waste recycling solution.
In collaboration with Ruttle, CDE co-created and delivered a bespoke wet processing solution to meet the company’s on-site requirements and commercial needs. The two partners say the turnkey solution will effectively process the incoming inert material to produce high quality recycled aggregates.
The 80 tonnes per hour wash plant includes a R4500 primary scalping screen, AggMax modular logwasher, EvoWash, AquaCycle and filter press.
CDE’s patented R4500 was created to handle the most troublesome materials – including heavily clay bound rock and gravel offering high energy screening of material before it enters the AggMax logwasher for scrubbing and classification. Fines are passed to the EvoWash unit, a high-frequency dewatering screen with hydrocyclone technology, providing precise control of silt cut points and eliminating the loss of quality fines producing a range of high-quality sands.
The new Ruttle plant also incorporates water recycling with the A400 AquaCycle thickener which is designed to ensure up to 90% of the process water can be recirculated back into the system, offering Ruttle a fully integrated primary water treatment solution.
The AquaCycle uses a flocculant to separate clean water from the solid particles. The remaining solid particles form a sludge which is dried further in the Filter Press, the final stage of the process. The Filter Press recovers any remaining water for recirculation and creates a dry filter cake that can be used for pipe bedding and landfill capping, the CDE turnkey solution ensures waste volume is minimal.
CDE says the new wash plant will produce a clean, certified recycled product for Ruttle, while enabling the company to achieve greater control of the material specification something that has become a critical part of its business.
Ruttle managing director Gareth Ruttle comments: “With the new CDE plant, we are able to increase supply to our current market and customers while exploring new opportunities for the recycled material. We are pleased to be able to divert high volumes of material from landfill while seeing huge benefits to our on-site operations.”
Ruttle will now produce two sand products 0-4mm, three aggregates 4-20mm and an oversized product. CDE says this means the group is meeting both its commercial and environmental aims – creating high value recycled products which has in turn opened new revenue possibilities.
Discussing the new project David Kinloch, CDE director of business development – UK & Ireland, said: “We’re delighted to work with Ruttle on this new project, the turnkey solution will increase the volumes of material the company can process and maximise recovery of quality recycled sand and aggregates as a sustainable alternative to diminishing virgin materials.”
