RECYCLING PLANTS: Problems in waste management

The recycling sector is growing exponentially every day thanks to the well-known and much-needed Circular Economy. This solution means that used resources and products can be reused again and again. Plants in which MSW, RDF, biomass, FORM or plastic packaging are treated have increasingly higher production requirements.

Waste has to be well treated for further reuse or combustion and all this is carried out in waste treatment plants, in this case recycling plants.

These recycling plants are likely to require the a better control due to their continuous inflow and outflow of material, where reaction time is critical and incident management must be quick to resolve.

As mentioned above, good waste management is of vital importance so that none of the parts of the process are affected and no deviations are created in the process.

These are some of the most common problems in recycling plants:

• The non-optimisation of the distribution of waste in the pit by the trucks: usually each truck arrives at a door or area and unloads all the material without maintaining an order or managing its traffic. It is possible that in the area of the pit where they are unloading, the crane and manipulator are stopped for whatever reason, this accumulation of material will not be able to be treated and this will generate a loss in the daily production.

• Generation of high pit temperatures: the temperature generated in the pits is not a factor that is usually controlled, but there are more and more cases in which the temperature of the waste in the pits is higher in certain points, leading to fires.

• There is no record of crane and handler data: on this occasion, rather than a problem, we could talk about the opportunity cost. Not having a control of the movements that are made daily, the load capacity in each movement, etc., can lead to inefficiencies in the management of the process. We are mainly talking about controlling and optimising the productivity of the process.

• Blockages in the material evacuation lines: these blockages are usually caused by not knowing the state of the line. The operator, not having the information about the filling capacity or due to oversight, continues to unload waste and can unload on another line or carry out other movements while the conveyor belt is being released.

These are just some of the problems that can occur in a recycling plant on a daily basis. But every problem has a solution...

If you liked this post, don´t miss the next one, "Vi4Crane software for recycling plants", where we will talk about the solutions offered by our system to avoid this kind of problems.