Balers are key pieces of machinery in the recycling industry. They compress recyclable materials into cubes, which makes the materials far easier to transport or store. Balers come in many different forms – with each type being suitable for a different set of applications. Here is a very brief guide to some of the most widely used types of baler in the recycling industry today.
Vertical Balers
Vertical balers are very widespread and are some of the most space-efficient balers on the market. They use a downward force to create bales. These balers are suitable for easily manipulated materials and are not recommended for heavy-duty industrial recycling use. Vertical balers are perfect for companies that are short on space and deal with a great deal of cardboard or plastic waste that needs to be processed. Although these balers are space efficient, they are not as powerful or time-efficient as some of the other machines on this list.
Horizontal Balers
Horizontal balers are often very large. You may have seen one of these machines at a commercial dump, where they are used to process cars and other heavy-duty waste. Recyclable waste is fed into a hopper. This hopper distributes material into a crush zone, which is slowly decreased in size by a horizontally moving ram. Check out recyclingbalers.com for some examples of vertical balers used in the recycling industry today. Horizontal balers can be up to 40 ft in length, allowing them to crush extremely large objects into manageable cubes.
Auto Tie Vertical Or Horizontal Balers
Many materials will fall apart, even when condensed into tight bales. To prevent this, recycling plants typically tie waste together with baling wire. Baling wire is extremely hard and potentially dangerous to tie manually, so plants that use it typically utilize auto tying machines. Auto tie balers tightly wind zinc coated high tensile wiring around baled waste so that it can be safely stored or transported.
Closed Door Balers
Closed-door balers produce extremely dense, strong bales of recycled material. Instead of an open mechanism, the bale is produced inside a closed steel cabinet – hence the ‘closed door’ designation. This kind of baler is useful for recycling plants looking to export recycled materials. Many kinds of recycled materials are exported and made into new goods in distant lands. There simply isn’t enough recycling capacity in countries like the United Kingdom for everything to be processed domestically. The UK currently exports over half of it’s recyclable plastic packaging. The tighter the bale, the more material can be fitted on the container ships that export them.
Two Ram Balers
Two ram balers allow recycling plants to work more quickly and efficiently. They use two hydraulic rams instead of one. One ram is used for compressing the material into a bale. The other is used for extracting the completed bale so that it can be stored or transported, and the next load of material can be fed into the machine. Compared to manually extracting bales, this process is very efficient.