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.
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They include:
Can Crusher: 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!
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.
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.
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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!
