Two models are available for use in scrap processing, tire recycling and demolition.

Kinshofer USA, Sanborn, New York, has introduced the DXS Series of hydraulic mobile excavator shears, which the company says features industry-leading power-to-weight ratios, jaw opening sizes, cycle times and hydraulic efficiency. The series, available in the DXS-40 and DXS-50 models, is suitable for scrap processing, tire recycling and demolition. Both models are also available with integrated Fuchs Quick Connect (FQC) system.

“We designed the DXS Series to enhance contractors’ productivity and ROI (return on investment,” says Francois Martin, Kinshofer North America general manager. “Traditionally, more power means a larger cylinder, which results in a bigger, heavier shear and, often, a larger machine. The DXS-50 has the same-sized cylinder as shears in the same weight class but with 25 percent more power, allowing our customers to achieve higher performance without investing in larger carriers. This saves them money upfront while improving their ROI with the attachment’s production-boosting qualities,” he adds.

Kinshofer’s DemaPower 2.0 cylinder technology gives the DXS-50 the same power as shears two sizes larger, according to the manufacturer. The cylinder uses four chambers instead of the two found in other shears, resulting in 20 percent more surface area within the cylinder. That allows the DXS Series to exert up to 25 percent more power from a smaller attachment, resulting in the best power-to-weight ratio in its size class, Kinshofer says. The 9,920-pound (4,500-kilogram) DXS-50 features a closing force of 1,203 tons (10,700 kilonewtons) compared with 922 tons (8,210 kilonewtons) from its 9,020-pound (4,100-kilogram) predecessor, the DRS-45.

Compared with the models from Kinshofer’s established DRS Series, the DXS-40 is marginally heavier than the DRS-30 and has the cutting performance, jaw opening and depth of the DRS-45. Like the DRS-45, the DXS-50 is suited for 25- to 35-ton carriers when boom mounted, and 32- to 50-ton carriers when stick mounted, according to the manufacturer. This means contractors can achieve a closing force equivalent to shears two sizes up, requiring a minimum 32-ton carrier, on an excavator weighing 7 tons less. In addition, the cylinder technology allowed the company to design the DXS-50 with a jaw opening 29.2 inches (74 centimeters) wide and 30.7 inches (78 centimeters) deep, which Kinshofer says is larger than any other shear in its weight class, as well as some larger models.

The DXS-50 reduces carrier fuel consumption by up to 20 percent compared with competitive shear models, the company says. The attachment’s design allows it to function normally when the carrier is set in economy mode, achieving the same performance as a competitive shear on an excavator running at full throttle.

The DXS-50’s high power-to-weight ratio makes the attachment well-suited to top-down demolition, Kinshofer says. Contractors can use smaller carriers and the attachment’s light weight and cylinder technology improve fuel efficiency while the excavator arm is fully extended. In addition, the attachment features a narrow frame to allow operators to better see their work.

Double-acting speed valves coupled with the cylinder technology gives the DXS-50 cycle times as fast as 5.5 seconds, 50 percent faster than any model in the attachment’s weight class, according to Kinshofer.

Rotation-equipped models feature 360-degree continuous rotation on an oversized slewing ring to bear high forces, shock loads and bending. According to the manufacturer, the rotation model also includes heavy-duty motors for maximum rotation torque.

The shear is designed with convenient service openings for fast access to shear hoses and hydraulics. The DXS-50 also features a piercing tip that can be welded again and replaced.

Drone technology is evolving to make it easier for managers to optimize their landfill operations.

Before the emergence of drones, landfill managers needed to either spend tens of thousands of dollars on an aircraft for aerial photogrammetry or painstaking hours walking to get a topographic survey of their site. These unmanned aircrafts have since brought the promise of more information with less time, labor and cost investments.

Those who used drones in their infancy, however, discovered this technology was not without its challenges. With more information came more data to process, along with the need for more advanced equipment and knowledge to do so.

Despite their potential to help managers optimize their landfills, the technological requirements behind drone mapping have created barriers to entry for operators with minimal tech or surveying experience. But newer advancements are coming up the pipeline to make the technology increasingly more accessible to the layman.

“Because of the [capabilities] of drones, the technology and software has advanced and the pricing has become more affordable,” says Phil Carrillo, the remote monitoring control director at SCS Engineers of Long Beach, California.

Paul Johnson, a technology manager for Hamm Inc. of Perry, Kansas, was an early adopter of drone technology. “We knew it would reset the standard for topography on the surveying side,” Johnson says.

Hamm Inc. operates more than 30 sites across Kansas, which include a material recovery facility (MRF), a landfill, two sand plants, a lightweight aggregate plant, asphalt plants and limestone quarries. It also offers services in aggregate production, paving and construction.

Johnson purchased his first drone, a fixed-wing model resembling a small airplane, in 2013 so the company could conduct its annual landfill flyover for a topographical map without spending nearly $25,000 on hiring a pilot to do so—a cost that equated to nearly the same purchase price of the drone.

But getting his program off the ground—literally—wasn’t simple. Johnson spent hours before flights setting out ground control points across the landfill for the drone to pick up on. Once the flight was complete, it produced “copious amounts of photos” that Johnson says he had to sift through and attempt to piece together. The sheer size of the data required Johnson to purchase a “massive computer,” and even then, the analysis was a finicky, grueling process that could take hours to process.

Johnson says it took him nearly six months to become comfortable with using the technology and turning the analyses into tangible data that could be applied to optimizing Hamm’s landfill.

“I normally did the data collection and surveying and passed it off to someone else for analysis. When we purchased the drone, it came with a lot of baggage,” Johnson says. “It was definitely a challenge at first. It was pretty tough to pick up. I just kind of taught myself over the course of what we’ve done.”

The days of laying out ground control points and spending hours in front of a computer processing data have come and gone. Johnson has since made several upgrades to his drone program, including adding a multirotor real-time kinematic (RTK) drone to his fleet.

Multirotor drones offer more maneuverability and automation, while the RTK capabilities eliminate much of the need for groundwork. Johnson now simply needs to drop a few ground control points on the site, program the flight destination into the drone’s GPS system and let it fly.

Last year, Johnson also invested in Propeller, a cloud-based data visualization and analytics platform. Because it’s cloud-based, it doesn’t require software installation or a large hard drive for storage. Johnson is now able to submit the drone’s hundreds of survey photos to Propeller, which are then processed and ready to view in digestible charts and graphs less than 24 hours later.

Though Propeller is an analytics platform, the Australian company has recently teamed with DJI, a drone manufacturer based in China, and Trimble, a GPS technology developer based in Sunnydale, California, to roll out a full suite of drone surveying technology.

The partnership was formed to create a more streamlined entry into drone mapping. The company now offers all the equipment needed for drone surveying—ground control points, drones and software—that are all made to easily work together.

Propeller and DJI also recently released a drone with post-processing kinematic (PPK) technology that, like RTK, minimizes the need for groundwork but offers more reliability. Johnson says he plans to purchase one this year to add to his fleet.

“The main thing we’re getting out of this new drone is very consistent output with very limited expertise required by the person planning the survey and flying the drone,” says Jim Greenberg, a product manager in the Trimble civil engineering division. “When you have consistent, reliable results, you can start making decisions based on your measurements.”

Since the upgrades, Johnson has been able to use his drone fleet across the entire scope of his company. He flies them over construction projects to track their progress. They’ve also proven to be useful marketing tools, as the cameras provide imagery from an aerial perspective to display on brochures and online.

Johnson says drones have also been helpful in the realm of employee safety. He deploys them to inspect tight, small spaces inaccessible to humans in the MRF, or to evaluate 40-foot excavations that pose falling dangers.

But the area they’ve proven most helpful in is managing the landfill. Johnson uses the drones to take inventory of the quarries both on and off the landfill every quarter. He also flies them multiple times to evaluate the landfill before building a new cell.

The technology can help landfill managers keep track of their capacity to make decisions on where they spend their time, where they put machines, when to build a new cell and when to begin planning to close up shop.

The technology can also help managers prolong their closure by achieving maximum compaction rates—a feat that has been difficult with traditional methods of weighing waste as it enters the facility.

“The problem with just weighing things is that the volume of a truckload [of waste] is not necessarily related to its weight,” Propeller CEO Rory San Miguel says. “What you get with drone survey now is the weight, and you have the volume, which means you end up with the density. And that’s really the number operators need to pay attention to.”

As drones become easier to use and cheaper to purchase, they become capable of more. Some landfill managers have begun adding sensors to their drones to monitor their facilities for heat or methane. For now, though, most users are occupied with uncovering the many surveying features of existing technology.

“Just the sheer quickness with which you can get a [topographical survey] of what the ground looks like these days and compare quantities makes things a lot faster,” Johnson says. “It’s just a great tool.”

The author is the assistant editor of Waste Today magazine and can be contacted at tcottom@gie.net.

Legislation would provide employment opportunities to veterans and 'help alleviate the tight labor market' in the waste and recycling industry.

The National Waste and Recycling Association (NWRA), Arlington, Virginia, has sent a letter to Congress urging support for H.R. 2045, also known as the "Veterans' Education, Transition and Opportunity Prioritization Plan Act of 2019." The legislation would establish an office within the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to better manage educational and employment programs for veterans, the association says in a news release.

 "At a time when our industry is facing a shortage of commercial vehicle drivers, mechanics and welders, we urge Congress to pass H.R. 2045,” says NWRA President and CEO Darrell Smith. “This legislation would strengthen the VA's education and job training programs and help alleviate the tight labor market in our industry.”

The private sector of the waste and recycling industry has a commercial motor vehicle (CMV) fleet of more than 100,000 waste, recycling and compost collection trucks. The industry has experienced a growing labor shortage over the past several years, particularly when it comes to hiring individuals with a CDL.

NWRA says driving for the waste and recycling industry would offer veterans rising wages, a five-day work week and set daily work schedules, as well as “being able to return home at the end of each day's shift.”

Unilever has committed to using larger amounts of recycled-content plastic in its global supply chain.

Europe-based household goods producer Unilever is taking steps toward its goal of using 25 percent recycled content in its plastic packaging by 2025, said a procurement manager for the firm who spoke at the Plastics Committee meeting of the Bureau of International Recycling (BIR). The Brussels-based BIR held its 2019 World Recycling Convention in May in Singapore.

Aurore Belhoste, who works from Singapore as a procurement manager for Unilever, said the multinational firm has taken numerous steps in recognition of the world’s concerns about single-use plastics as a contributor to plastics in the ocean.

Some of those measures involve substituting for plastic, including the use of paperboard and aluminum as a packaging material in place of plastic and designing a toothbrush made of bamboo. “We are trying to reduce our use of single-use plastics,” said Belhoste.

Of greater encouragement to the recyclers gathered, Unilever also has made efforts to source and use recycled-content plastics (also known as postconsumer resin, or PCR) in its packaging. Belhoste commented that 26 percent of the plastic used globally goes into packaging and that a global sustainability effort Unilever has signed onto calls for “responsible consumption and production” of the raw materials it uses.

To live up to that commitment, Belhoste said Unilever has identified two main goals: “By 2025, all of our plastic packaging will be reusable, recyclable or compostable,” and “by 2025, 25 percent of plastic packaging will come from recycled plastic content, or PCR.”

Belhoste pointed to the 100 percent PCR packaging used in Unilever’s Love Beauty and Planet products as one example.

She also said collection efforts underway in nations including India and Indonesia are being developed to capture more discarded plastic for recycling in nations such as those, where it too often ends up in the natural environment, and then the ocean. The goal of such efforts “is to come up with different pilots and scale them up,” said Belhoste. Some of the pilot programs involve apps that can let scavengers know where they can bring certain types of plastic and be paid for it.

On the PCR production front, Belhoste said Unilever continues to work with technology providers to overcome challenges related to odors that can arise from using PCR, and in creating colors for PCR products that can be acceptable to consumers.

Any good news that can come from deep-pocketed companies like Unilever will be welcomed by plastics recyclers. BIR Plastics Committee delegates portrayed a 2019 market for plastic scrap that is challenging. Steve Wong of Hong Kong-based Fukutomi Recycling Ltd. said in East Asia “almost all types of recycled polymers are not selling well.” For recyclers there, “Profit margins are narrow and getting less and less.”

Clement Lefebvre of Veolia Proprete France Recycling said European primary producers “now want to play a role in the recycling world,” which could help absorb European plastic scrap that formerly headed to China, Malaysia and Thailand. In the next 10 years Europe may need to develop more than 1 million metric tons of capacity, “and that’s a huge challenge,” said Lefebvre. (Within days of the BIR convention’s conclusion, Malaysia’s government proclaimed it would begin returning imported plastic scrap shipments to their country of origin.)

In the United States, export markets also “have been greatly reduced” stated Sally Houghton of the Plastic Recycling Corp. of California. Within the U.S., however, Houghton said there is healthy demand for HDPE and PET scrap, with polypropylene (PP) also growing as a grade that is attracting significant investments in domestic recycling capacity.

BIR immediate past President Ranjit Baxi summed up the current situation by saying, “Plastic is at the forefront of all recycling conversations.”

Stated Plastics Committee Chairman Henk Alessma of Netherlands-based Vita Plastics, “The plastic industry is in a transition phase from a linear model to a circular economy model.”

The 2019 BIR World Recycling Convention & Exhibition was held May 19-22 at the Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore.

The new dealership expands the availability of SANY port and material handling products in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia.

SANY America, Peachtree City, Georgia, has announced that Tri-Lift NC Inc., Greensboro, North Carolina, agreed to represent the SANY material handling line of products, including high-capacity lift trucks and container handling equipment. SANY manufactures, sells and supports construction and material handling equipment, including crawler cranes, rough terrain cranes, excavators, container reach stackers and empty container handlers. 

According to a news release from SANY, this agreement expands the SANY dealership network dramatically, increasing SANY’s availability in the Atlantic region while expanding both companies’ ability to support customer equipment in the field. 

Tri-Lift NC, Inc. has been a provider of high-quality warehouse equipment and superior customer support since 1968. By adding SANY’s port and material handling equipment to its inventory, Tri-Lift NC Inc. will now be able to reach customers requiring higher capacity moves, SANY reports in a news release. With the recent completion of its new full-service material handling facility in Garner, North Carolina, the company has reduced response times for servicing customers in eastern North Carolina. 

“This large capacity forklift and port equipment market segment has been dominated by just a few manufacturers. As a result of this lack of competition, customers have endured products that have not been updated with the latest technology,” says Bob Bond, CEO of Tri-Lift NC. “Service support has slipped because vendors did not feel the pressure of competitors to improve their services, and I feel that will all change with the SANY product.”

Tri-Lift NC carries accessories and replacement components for SANY equipment, and offers rapid on-site repair service for customers, with response times of less than four hours in many areas, SANY reports in a news release. In addition to the Garner location, the company also has existing locations in Charlotte and Raleigh, North Carolina, as well as Greenville, South Carolina.

“We’re excited to have such a quality dealer in Tri-Lift to represent the SANY brand,” says Doug Friesen, CEO of SANY America. “They truly represent the passion and drive that embodies SANY.”