Persuing Plastics—MA Industries

Plastic is the common denominator of this Georgia-based company’s three divisions, which make plastic products and manufacture both plastic and battery recycling equipment.

By Rebecca Porter

Rebecca Porter is an associate editor of Scrap.

In the 1967 hit movie “The Graduate,” Mr. McGuire had one word of advice about the future for Benjamin Braddock: “Plastics.”

Bob Peacock must have been a visionary because by then he was already into plastics. At night in the late 1960s in hotel rooms around the country, when Peacock was a traveling salesman, he conceived of making a masking tape applicator out of injection-molded plastic. From this small seed eventually grew M.A. Industries Inc., the Peachtree City, Ga.-based firm that Peacock directs as president and CEO, with brother J.D. assisting as vice president.

M.A. has grown into a three-division company. First, there’s the molding division, which manufactures plastic products, chiefly manhole steps—another of Peacock’s creations—made of corrosion-resistant PP molded around a U-shaped piece of 1/2-inch rebar. Then there’s the polymers division, which compounds and colors plastics, and finally, the engineering division, which manufactures postconsumer plastic recycling and battery reclamation equipment.

Though M.A. Industries has evolved considerably since its inception, “there’s one thing in common with everything we do in this company—and that’s plastic,” notes Michael Stout, vice president of the engineering division.
Plastic’s Possibilities

M.A. Industries’ headquarters is really more of a complex, composed of three large buildings sitting side by side—first its corporate offices, then all plastic operations, then engineering. Each has a separate driveway, and as a symbolic reminder of their different functions, the structures aren’t physically connected. The common denominator is the engineering division, which designs the systems for both plastic and battery recovery.

This upscale setup is a far cry from the firm’s early days, when Bob Peacock had no facility at all, but rather had to contract an Atlanta firm to make his plastic masking tape applicator. To identify the product, he developed a logo incorporating an “m” and an “a”—short for Mask App.

As fate would have it, Peacock became the firm’s plant manager and eventually bought out the partner. All of a sudden, he found himself running his own plastic business. The first challenge was what to call the fledgling operation. As he recounts, “I had this logo already made, and M.A. Industries sounded a lot better than Peacock Plastics.”

It was around this time that Peacock developed the plastic manhole step and moved from downtown Atlanta to Peachtree City, today a bustling community of 30,000—but then a small suburb of 800 residents. “When we first moved here, it was so small we had to go out of town to get a sandwich,” he jokes.

At that time, M.A. Industries was buying virgin material to feed into its molding machines. Then came the oil embargo of the early 1970s. The wage and price controls imposed during that time diminished the supplies available to manufacturers such as M.A. Industries, which was given a limited allocation of material by its suppliers.

This was a serious matter. “We weren’t getting enough material to make our products, so we started looking for other sources of scrap plastics,” says Stout.

M.A. Industries found salvation in spent battery cases, which were starting to be made out of PP in place of the traditional rubber. So it began accepting empty battery cases—which were usually landfilled or incinerated—and hand-washing and processing them to see if the plastic could be reused.

It could.

And the firm’s engineering division was born, with the focus on creating equipment that could process such battery casings into reusable plastic. “This division was an accident, literally,” states Stout. “No one else was reusing battery casings at that point. It’s not that we thought there was going to be that big a market for it.” Or, as Ron Egan, marketing manager for the engineering division, adds, “The only reason for developing our battery breaker was for the plastic.”

Entering the Equipment Niche

M.A. Industries built its first battery-breaking system in 1979, using reclaimed battery plastic as feedstock for its injection-molded products (a practice it continues to this day). The problem was that EPA and other guidelines established for lead smelters also applied to battery-breaking operations. As a result, Peacock says, the firm found it “a lot easier to build the equipment and sell it to the battery recycling industry, then let them wash and crush the cases and sell us chips.”

With the decision to market its battery-breaking system, M.A. Industries plugged a gap in the battery recycling process. At the time, lead smelters and battery producers recovered the lead from spent batteries and discarded the plastic casings, which meant they had to buy virgin plastic to make new ones. They wanted a system that could process whole, undrained batteries and recover the casing plastic as well as the lead.

M.A. Industries’ systems enabled them to do just that. “We were the missing link in the closed loop,” explains Stout. The company, in fact, says its battery reclamation system was the first to be able to separate and recover the various component parts of spent batteries. It also takes credit for being the principal force behind “getting recycled battery casing material back into new battery casings,” says Peacock, who notes proudly that “now more than 70 percent of automotive battery casings are made out of recycled material.”

More than being just the missing link in the battery processing chain, M.A. Industries’ battery-breaking systems have also been a successful link. At last count, the firm had shipped about 120 machines to 29 countries around the world, including China, Australia, and some in South America, Indonesia, Europe, and the Middle East, with typical customers being secondary lead smelters and battery manufacturers. According to Stout, M.A. Industries and an Italian manufacturer are the only two companies in the world that make battery-breaking systems, claiming that their machines process about 99 percent of all recycled batteries. The other 1 percent is recycled in systems developed in-house by secondary lead smelters.

Breaking Batteries

This type of success doesn’t happen to just any product. It has occurred because M.A. Industries has continually upgraded its battery processing systems to make them a must-buy for customers.

After creating its first system in 1979, for example, the company wasted no time in upgrading it. Two short years later, in 1981, it had developed a system that could crush whole lead-acid batteries and recover separate streams of metallic lead, lead oxide, PP, and rubber.

Along the way, M.A. Industries has improved the technology of its system to remove kinks and increase its efficiency and productivity. The firm’s first battery breakers, for example, screened lead paste on a woven wire conveyor and let it settle in a tank. This approach had several drawbacks, however. The major concern was that the woven wire conveyor blinded and allowed fine metallics and organic materials to mix with the paste.

Jump ahead to the firm’s M.A. DS system, which crushes whole batteries and uses a rotary screen to separate the four components into the cleanest possible final products.

In this system, which comes in capacities from 5 to 50 mt per hour, a feed conveyor begins the process by dumping batteries into a hammermill crusher. The crushed material and recirculated water is then moved by a screw conveyor into the primary rotary screen.

Then the components diverge. The fine lead paste fraction and liquid pass through the rotary screen into an oxide transport screw that conveys it to a tank called an elutriator. Here, the materials are agitated at a set velocity that keeps the paste suspended in a homogeneous mixture, while the fine particles of metallic lead settle to the bottom. Overflow from the elutriator is collected in a surge tank.

When the liquid in the surge tank reaches a set level, it is pumped to one of two desulfurization reactors, where soda ash or caustic soda is added to reach a set pH level and specific gravity. This transforms the lead sulfate in the mixture to lead carbonate. The slurry is then pumped to two plate-and-frame filter presses, where the filtrate is further treated, then discharged. The resulting lead carbonate filter cake is 10-to-12-percent moisture with a total sulfur content of less than 2 percent, which means less slag generation for the smelter, the company says.

Meanwhile, the oversize material exits the rotary screen to a crossover screw conveyor, where it is washed with recirculated water. The water and any residual paste washed off the material is collected and discharged through a screen back into the paste circuit. The rest of the material exits the screw conveyor into the lead metal classifier.

Here, a rising current of water floats off the light materials while the metallic lead sinks to the bottom of the tank to be collected and removed by a screw conveyor. The final metallic lead product has a total moisture content of under 3 percent and is less than 1 percent nonmetallic by weight, according to the firm.

The rest of the overflow and materials are discharged into a second rotary screen to be rinsed with recirculated water and sent to the rubber/plastic classifier, where clean water floats off the PP. Rubber and battery separators sink to the bottom of the tank and are discharged by a screw conveyor. The final separator/hard rubber product contains less than 1/2 percent metallic lead by weight, the company says.

Paddle wheel agitators move the floating plastic chips to the back of the classifier, where a screw conveyor drops them into an air conveyor. After it is dried, the PP fraction can be extruded and pelletized for reuse in battery cases.

And it should be noted that the firm’s systems not only process spent batteries, but they process them in an environmentally sound way. Operating wet is one principal way the company achieves this goal. This is essential, Stout explains, because “when lead oxide dries, it dusts. That’s when you have lead contamination problems.” The firm’s systems are also contained, he adds, “so that you don’t have liquid effluent running all over the place.” And most of the structures that house the company’s systems are air-treated and ventilated.

A New Plastic Niche

Getting into the battery processing niche was fortuitous for M.A. Industries for several reasons. The move gave the firm much-needed feedstock for its plastic product operations—sometimes more raw material than it needed, which led to other opportunities. “Whenever we started to reprocess more material than we needed in one product, it caused us to start looking for other products to mold out of the same material,” says J.D. Peacock.

M.A. Industries’ battery processing pursuits also led it into the equipment-making business, first as a manufacturer of battery-breaking systems and, later, postconsumer plastic processing machinery. The firm began by creating individual components of plastic processing equipment, such as granulators and spin dryers, and it put these pieces to the test—for R&D and profit—by using them in its own postconsumer plastic recycling operation.

The company soon got itchy, however, to make more than just individual pieces of plastic processing equipment. It wanted to make turnkey systems, including one capable of processing mixed plastics. “We wanted to build a system that was completely designed and manufactured here,” says Egan. “Most of our competitors buy grinders from somewhere and dryers from somewhere and try to piece them all together and get it to work. Usually they have problems.”

When the Crisp County Waste Authority in south Georgia decided to build a material recovery facility that would have the ability to process a variety of postconsumer recyclables—including aluminum, steel, glass, various paper grades, compostables, and plastics—M.A. was called on to design a system that could wash and granulate four plastic streams: natural HDPE, mixed HDPE, clear PET, and green PET.

The system it created was the M.A. 741 PCPR—short for postconsumer plastics reclamation—a fully integrated, automated setup that can process up to 5,000 pounds an hour of commingled postconsumer PET and HDPE containers into clean flake.

The system works like this: Whole commingled bales go into the feeding system, which breaks the bales and meters out material onto a conveyor for hand-sorting to the appropriate PET or HDPE module for further processing.

The HDPE is first fed into a granulator that produces 1/2-inch flakes, then conveyed into a float/sink classifier. Here, the flakes float and nonplastic materials sink and are subsequently removed. The HDPE flakes are then air-conveyed into a holding hopper and discharged into a scrubber that washes them in a special temperature-controlled solution to remove glue and other contaminants. Next, the flakes are discharged through a dewatering screen— which recovers the washing media—and into a final float/sink classifier to remove any remaining heavy contaminants. After the clean HDPE flakes are dried in a spin dryer, they are ready for re-extrusion or packaging.
The PET module operates similarly, producing clean 3/8-inch flakes.

A Plastic Future

In its almost three decades in business, M.A. Industries has become a unique mix of plastic product manufacturer and producer of specialized equipment for both the plastic and battery recycling markets. It has certainly come a long way from its humble hotel-room origins, but where does the firm plan to go from here?

One plan is to extend its already-considerable international reach even further. “Historically, we’ve sold more plants abroad than we have at home in terms of both dollars and numbers,” says Stout, noting that foreign customers already account for about 75 percent of the firm’s sales. The real push now is to get more into the C.I.S., the Middle East, and Asia. As Egan expands, “Third World countries are coming to us because their governments have gotten very concerned about pollution, and they want their manufacturers to meet the same requirements that we in the United States have to meet. So they’re coming to us looking to solve the problem.”

Achieving significant growth in the battery-breaking niche will be a challenge, however, considering that most such systems have a long working life—at least 15 years—and that there is only a finite number of customers for the specialized equipment. To capture opportunities in this niche, M.A. Industries plans to continue producing new systems such as its DS model that give ever-cleaner separations. “We aim to keep improving all the time,” says Joe Littleton, the new managing director of the engineering division.

The company sees brighter and broader opportunities on the horizon for its plastic processing systems. One encouraging trend, Stout notes, is that government agencies on both the state and federal levels are increasingly being required to purchase recycled goods, including some containing recycled plastics. In addition, many big companies “are trying to make a portion of their plastic products and bottles out of recycled material,” says Egan, concluding, “I think plastics are what will keep us going.”

So it seems that for M.A. Industries at least, Mr. McGuire was right. The future was—and continues to be—plastics. •