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Industries Should Consider What Can Be Recycled

For the most part, there is no limit to what can be recycled. Metals, wood, rubber, paper, waste and various industrial liquids can all be reclaimed or repurposed to some degree. When most people think of material reclamation, they think about individuals separating their glass from aluminum for small scale applications. What many don’t realize is that industrial equipment, cars and other large objects can also be processed and reclaimed. Before this material can be handled, though, it needs to be reduced in size and separated for final processing.

Metal, paper, plastic and glass are commonly reclaimed materials, but what can also be recycled may surprise some people
. Huge pieces of industrial machinery are made of many materials, each of which can be reclaimed during processing. Vehicles, piles of tires, industrial liquids like milling liquids and waste chemicals, and even foundry sand can all be processed. In short, there is little that can’t be repurposed or restored. However, preparing all of these materials for final processing requires a lot of work.

When industrial machinery or vehicles are no longer doing their job properly, they should be reclaimed instead of thrown away. Not only is this good for the environment, companies that dispose of their waste in this way may receive subsidies or payment for their material. What can be recycled from these materials include ferrous metals like iron and steel, nonferrous metals like copper and brass, and rubber. Before reclamation, workers at the processing plant remove any usable parts from the machine or vehicle that can be refurbished and sold back to consumers. When this is done, what remains is placed on a conveyor and transported to a huge shredder. Before shredding, a large toothed drum grabs and crushes the material. This crushed material is then fed into the shredder, which uses a series of rotary grinders to reduce everything to fist-sized chunks. Upholstery, rubber and other nonmetals are separated immediately using vacuums. The rubber, upholstery and other materials are separated further. The rubber can be shredded again to create aggregate that’s useful for many applications.

There is almost no limit to what metals can be recycled
. Metals can also be reclaimed over and over with no loss of properties or quality. However, they must be effectively separated before processing. The first step is to separate ferrous metals from nonferrous metals. This can be done with large magnetic drums that come in contact with the material. Steel and iron are plucked out by these drums while the nonferrous material is collected in a separate area. Once these materials are separated, they are collected and sold to other facilities that separate them out more precisely and melt them down.

Wood can also be shredded and repurposed to create other materials
. Particle board and organic flooring are a couple products that can be made from reclaimed wood. It can also be used to create biomass fuel which can be burned for many purposes.

Before throwing away anything, industries should consider what can be recycled. Even huge pieces of industrial equipment can be turned into useful material again. Even though it takes a lot of work, it requires much less energy than producing new products and can also produce a modest cash return for the company.




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