Essential Machinery for Recycling Facilities

Whether you’re the manager of a recycling facility or you’re working toward opening your own, efficiency is the means to a profitable business. Of course, providing adequate training will increase your employees’ proficiency, but they’ll also need equipment. Follow our guide to learn the essential machinery for recycling facilities.

Magnetic separators

Whether your facility primarily handles metal recycling or not, you should have a magnetic separator to help you sort ferrous materials from nonferrous materials. If you’re searching for metal objects to recycle, a magnetic separator will do all the hard work for you and discard anything you don’t want. Alternatively, if you don’t handle metal at your facility, a magnetic separator will sort smaller ferrous materials efficiently and allow you to sell them to another facility.

Granulator and shredder

One of the biggest moneymakers in scrap yards and metal recycling is copper wire; that’s why you don’t see a metal recycling facility without a granulator. While most companies use granulators for copper wire, they’re also great for breaking down plastic, wood, and many other materials. In addition to a granulator, every recycling facility should have either a two-shaft or four-shaft shredder. The primary difference between a granulator and a shredder is their speed and the size of the output. Granulators are faster and break down the material to extremely small particles, while shredders are slower and leave larger particles.

Balers

No recycling facility is complete without at least one baler, and most have more than one. There are several variations of balers, but the traditional baler is about five feet wide and used to compact materials like cardboard, PET plastic, and paper goods. Additionally, some balers are common for condensing material like aluminum cans, while others can condense large materials like radiators.

Before you can consider the essential machinery for recycling facilities, you must identify what your facility handles. If you work with various materials, you might need one of everything and then some. If you handle only metal materials, you might need just a few along with some metal shears and magnets. In general, the main pieces of equipment mentioned above are the bare minimum every recycling facility needs in their arsenal.