Recycling Equipment
A Recycling Equipment Primer for Consumers…
You might be surprised to know that a lot of heavy machinery is used in your local recycling programs. This recycling equipment is used to sort, compact and help to process your recycling materials into marketable bulk materials. Let’s take a quick look at some of the most common recycling machinery used in recycling centers around the U.S.
They include: One of the most common pieces of recycling equipment is the can crusher. Aluminum is a wonderful metal to recycle because it is 100% renewable. The can crusher helps to remove anything which the consumer may have stuffed into a can, and then crushes the cans down as small as possible for transport to an industrial aluminum recycling plant. Often can crushers also wash the cans in the process!
Can Crusher:
Baler: Another very common piece of recycling equipment is the baler. Balers come in many sizes and types depending on what they will be used for. Just as a hay baler turns hay from a field into bales of hay for farms, the recycling baler turns your used recyclable materials into bales of plastic and paper. The size of the bale made depends on the baler used in the process. These bales of plastic and paper are tied and then sold to scrap companies who cart them off to the industrial recycling plants for plastics and paper products. A handy little Can Crusher for Home and lite business use try Northern Industrial Tools Automatic Feed Can Crusher.
Conveyor: Conveyors are commonly used in recycling. They are used to move heavy bales and scrap metals from one area of the recycling center to another.
Sometimes they are used simply to take heavy items from consumers and dump them into a large recycling container, other times they are used to move the large bales from the baler into trucks or storage areas.
Shredder: When we think of shredders we generally think of the small office models we all use to shred our unwanted personal or business papers. Commercial shredders are big pieces of recycling equipment which are able to shred large amounts of paper all at one time. The large paper and document shredders at your recycling center turn your unwanted paper into large bags of shredded material. This material is then sent off industrial to paper recycling plants where it is converted back into paper pulp and new paper and corrugated supplies are made from it.
Solvent Recycling Equipment: Another common piece of recycling equipment is used for solvent recycling. This equipment generally uses a distillation process to turn harmful solvents back into water and useful components.
Tire Shredder: Another popular piece of recycling equipment is the tire shredder. This impressive machinery takes a tire and shreds it down into more manageable pieces of rubber. This rubber is then used in things like road pavement and playgrounds.
As you can easily see there are many kinds of large equipment used in the recycling process. See which ones you can spot on your next trip to your local recycling center!