The commissioning of the plant from CDE is the first stage in Walker Quarries' 10-year growth plan to increase its client base and expand into new material offerings.

Those growth plans are underpinned by a mining licence to produce up to 500,000t of aggregates per year.

The quarry near Wallerawang mines hard rock quartzite, which is crushed on site to make construction aggregates and manufactured sand.

Its previous plant could only process 50-60tph. The quarry team would have to switch out screens to produce two different sand types, which led to extra downtime.

The wash plant replacing it comprises CDE's M-Series M4500 modular wash plant, an Aggmax scrubbing and classification system, an Aquacycle high-rate thickener and a filter press sludge dewatering system.

The plant can produce two sand products simultaneously.

It is producing two washed sands at 0-3mm and 3-5mm, and six washed and scrubbed aggregates at 5-8mm, 8-75mm, 10-14mm, 14-20mm, 20-75mm and +75mm oversize.

The manufactured sand is being used in the local construction industry while the fine sand and aggregates are being supplied to underly the turf on football and cricket fields as drainage material.

The M4500 wash plant integrates feeding, screening, sand and aggregate washing, and stockpiling on a single chassis with a customisable hydrocyclone configuration.

The Aquacycle is a high-rate thickener that can recycle up to 90% of the process water for immediate reuse in the system.

Due to the abrasive nature of the coarse sand going through the plant CDE altered its Atro-feed jet-pump system into the sand plant to increase pump and cyclone life and reduce downtime and operating costs.

The plant also has CDE's Smarttech management app, which helps users understand their plant's performance and make informed decisions to increase productivity, efficiency and up-time.

Walker Quarries quarry manager said the benefits of the increased productivity and outputs were already evident.