RECYCLING
CONSCIOUS
CONVEYING How a higher spend on conveyor belts will result in much less intervention by engineers, increased levels of waste processing and a significantly reduced cost of ownership
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o other industry places a wider, more aggressive range of demands on conveyor belts than the recycling industry. Every time a belt needs to be repaired or replaced operators will incur costs, not only direct costs but also lost processing time. Despite this, belt selection is all too often based on price. This may be owing to a perceived lack of value of the materials being conveyed and/or a lack of understanding as to why the toughness and longevity of one conveyor belt can differ so enormously from another. Here, leading conveyor belt authority, Leslie David, provides insight into how to select belts that require significantly less repair and maintenance and provide a considerably longer and therefore more cost-efficient working lifetime.
OILS, RESINS AND CHEMICALS
Research shows that organic waste is the largest component of household waste mixture (69%). Surprisingly, plastic represents less than 11%. Household waste contains very high levels of oils and resins that have an extremely detrimental effect on the performance and life expectancy of the rubber conveyor belts that carry
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Oils and chemicals seriously damage rubber
it from one recycling stage to the next. Within the waste there is a wide variety of chemical-based domestic products such as cleaning agents, bleach, corrosives and other chemicals harmful to rubber. There are two distinct sources of oil,
resins, fats and greases. Vegetable oil is the most predominant source and is defined as all forms of oil and resin derived from flora and fauna. The other primary source is mineral oil, which is usually a liquid by-product of refining crude oil to make gasoline