Our recycling screening equipment is designed for fixed plant, built in Grantham, and specified around the material you actually process rather than a standard catalogue machine.
If you run a materials recovery facility, a glass reprocessing line or a plastics washing plant, the screen is usually what decides whether your product meets specification. Get it right and everything downstream gets easier. Get it wrong and you spend the rest of the process trying to correct it.
Screening separates a mixed feed into fractions by particle size. In recycling that job is rarely just about size, because size correlates with value. Fines carry the contamination. Oversize carries the material you can sell.
A vibratory screen works by driving the bed of material across an inclined surface. The motion causes the load to stratify, so smaller particles work their way down through the bed to the deck surface while larger material rides on top. Anything smaller than the aperture passes through. Anything larger carries on to the discharge end.
That sounds simple. In practice, how well it works depends on how the material is presented to the deck, how deep the bed is, how the screen is driven, and what the deck is made of. Those four things are where most screening problems start, and they are covered further down this page.
In most recovery operations the screen is early in the line, and its performance sets the tone for everything after it.
A typical arrangement runs feed hopper, then a grizzly feeder to scalp off the coarse fraction and protect what follows, then the main screen to split the material into two, three or four size fractions. From there each fraction goes to whatever the process needs: air separation, magnets and eddy current for metals, optical sorting for polymers, manual picking for the residual.
Put the screen in the wrong place and you make life harder for every machine after it. Optical sorters, in particular, work far better on a narrow size band presented as a single layer. Feed one a wide-graded, multi-layer stream and detection rates fall away regardless of how good the sorter is.
That relationship between screening and sorting is why we would rather talk about your whole process than quote a screen in isolation.
Glass. Cullet is abrasive and unforgiving. Deck wear is the main consideration, along with getting a clean split between the fine fraction, which carries ceramic and organic contamination, and the saleable size bands. Screen media choice matters more here than almost anywhere else.
Plastics. Flake and regrind are light, they carry static, and they blind screens readily. Bulk density is low, so the same tonnage occupies far more deck area than a mineral feed would. Screens for plastics generally need more open area and a more aggressive action than the numbers alone would suggest.
Metals. Shredded aluminium, mixed non-ferrous and light iron fractions all screen well, but the feed is often irregular in shape. Long, flat or wiry pieces behave nothing like the roughly cubic particles most sizing calculations assume, and a screen specified purely on tonnage will disappoint.
Rubber and tyres. Crumb and granulate need tight size control because the end market is specific about grading. Rubber is also prone to blinding on woven wire, which usually pushes the specification towards polyurethane or a rubber deck.
Most search results for recycling screening equipment show mobile trommels, star screens and tracked machines. Those are good at what they do, which is working outdoors, moving between sites and handling green waste, soil and construction and demolition arisings.
They are a different tool from what we build, and it is worth being clear about which one your operation needs.
A mobile screener earns its keep where the work moves. If you are processing on multiple sites, screening seasonally, or handling variable feed under a contract that might end, the flexibility is worth the compromise on throughput and precision.
A static vibratory screen earns its keep where the work stays put. In a fixed plant running the same material day after day, a screen sized properly for that duty will give you a tighter cut, better availability, lower cost per tonne and a machine that integrates with the rest of the line rather than sitting beside it. It also lasts a long time, which matters when you are depreciating capital equipment over a decade or more.
If your plant is permanent, screening is continuous, and product specification is contractual, the static route is almost always the right one.
The Mogensen Sizer. Our best known machine uses several steeply inclined decks with progressively narrower apertures, working on the probability principle rather than conventional screening. Because a particle gets many chances to pass through an aperture considerably larger than itself, the Sizer handles high throughput in a compact footprint and copes far better with near-size material than a flat deck. For recycling duties where feed is variable and space is short, it is often the answer. Full detail is on the Mogensen Sizer page.
Vibratory screens. Conventional multi-deck vibratory screens for straightforward sizing duties, built to the deck configuration, aperture and drive arrangement your material needs.
Grizzly feeders. Scalping ahead of the main screen, protecting downstream equipment and taking the coarse fraction out before it causes damage.
Feeders and conveyors. Controlled, even presentation of material to the screen. This is not an afterthought. Feed presentation is one of the biggest single influences on screening efficiency, and a screen fed by a surging conveyor will never perform to specification.
We also supply equipment across waste management more broadly, including transfer stations and energy from waste operations.
The deck surface does the work, and the right choice depends on the material rather than habit.
Woven wire gives the highest open area and the sharpest cut for the money. It is the default for most dry, free-flowing feeds. It wears quickly on glass and blinds readily on anything damp, fibrous or rubbery.
Polyurethane lasts considerably longer than wire on abrasive duties and resists blinding well. You give up open area, so a polyurethane deck generally needs to be larger than the wire deck it replaces to move the same tonnage.
Rubber is the choice for heavy impact and coarse abrasive feeds. It is quieter, which is a genuine consideration in an enclosed building, and it handles glass and aggregate well.
Perforated plate suits coarse scalping where the priority is surviving impact rather than fine separation.
Most plants end up with a mix, wire on the fine decks and polyurethane or rubber on the coarse. Changing media is also the cheapest way to fix a screening problem, which is worth remembering before anyone specifies a new machine.
Four things account for most of the underperformance we see on site.
Blinding. Particles lodge in the apertures and progressively close off the deck. Damp fines, plastic film and rubber crumb are the usual culprits. Blinding rarely announces itself. Throughput drifts down over weeks, the fine fraction gets dirtier, and it gets blamed on the feed. Ball decks, heated decks, changed media or a different aperture shape will usually fix it.
Near-size material. Particles close to the aperture size are the hardest to screen, because they need to arrive at the deck in the right orientation to pass. A feed heavy in near-size needs more deck length, a different action, or a probability screen like the Sizer rather than a conventional flat deck.
Moisture. Surface moisture makes fines stick to coarse particles and to each other. A material that screens perfectly in summer can become a problem in February. If your feed is stockpiled outdoors, that seasonal swing needs designing for rather than discovering.
Feed rate and bed depth. Too thin a bed wastes deck area. Too deep and the fines never reach the surface to pass through. Screens are specified for a bed depth, and running a machine well above its design rate does not just reduce efficiency, it accelerates wear.
Machines are built at our works on Harlaxton Road in Grantham, which means the people who design them are the people you speak to when something needs changing. We hold spares for the equipment we supply, and screen media, springs, drive components and wear parts are available without a long lead time from overseas.
For a fixed plant, that matters more than the purchase price. An unplanned week of downtime on a recycling line costs more than the difference between the cheapest quote and the right machine.
Every recycling feed behaves differently, and the honest answer to most screening questions is that we would need to understand your material and your process before recommending anything. We are happy to look at a sample, visit the plant, and tell you if a screen is the right answer.
Get in touch with the team to discuss your application.
Can’t find what you’re looking for? Maybe these FAQs could help.
A screener separates mixed recyclable material into different size fractions. In recycling it usually does two jobs at once: producing correctly graded product for sale, and removing the fine fraction where most of the contamination sits.
That depends on tonnage, bulk density, the number of fractions you want, and how much near-size material is in the feed. Bulk density is the one most often overlooked. Plastic flake at a low bulk density needs far more deck area than the same tonnage of glass cullet.
Yes. A multi-deck screen produces one more product than it has decks, so a three deck machine gives four fractions. Every extra deck adds height and complexity, so it is worth being honest about which splits genuinely earn their place.
Identify the cause first. Damp fines, film and rubber each blind for different reasons and need different fixes. Options include changing media type, changing aperture shape, fitting ball decks, or adjusting the drive. It is rarely a machine problem and usually a specification one.
No. We build static vibratory screening equipment for fixed installations. If your operation genuinely needs to move between sites, a mobile screener supplier will serve you better, and we would tell you so.