The Problem: How to shred foam rubber bales quickly and automatically
It’s Spring, and as Ellen DeGeneres says “If you want to get rid of stuff, you can always do a good spring-cleaning. Or you can do what I do, Move.”
In the age of Marie Kondo and small businesses that come to your home and organise your household, you’ll find a lot of people simply chucking their old furniture into the skip, in favour of a de-cluttered and organised home.
While we’re all for a good old spring clean, this always leaves us thinking about what happens to those pre-loved items that have been tossed aside.
Landfills in NZ do a good job of sorting through discarded materials, and diverting what they can to the local recycling plants. With household items such as couches, mattresses and carpets, what results are huge bales of foam rubber waste.
Evashred were approached to supply a shredder that could shred big 1.1-meter cubed 400Kg bales of high-density foam in less than 15 minutes, and without any human intervention in the shredding process.
The Solution: Evashred EV110E to the rescue
Our team from Evashred decided to offer the Evashred EV110E with a purpose-built force feed hopper system. This is where our highly skilled engineers came in. This hopper system had 4 sets of driven cleats, one set on each side wall of the shredders hopper.
The bale of foam would be loaded onto the front infeed conveyor that could be adjusted in angle to deliver the bale to the shredders chamber.
During operation, the EV110E shredder would draw in the foam so quickly, ultimately it would overload with product, we designed it to reverse itself to clear the product, fulfilling the ‘no human intervention’ part of the brief.
When shredding foam, the memory of the product is put back into the foam, you quickly see the underside of the shredder fill with shredded product while the shredder steadily consumes the bale of foam.
Our brief from the client was to offer a shredder and hopper system that could manage shredding a complete 400Kg bale of foam in 15 minutes or less, what Evashred offered managed to shred 2 x 400Kg ales in less than 15 minutes which delighted the client.
https://youtu.be/5EcKynFaZi4 this is a link to a video test of the special hopper.
What Happens Next:
Once the bales had been shredded, there was a whole other set of processes to turn the waste into re-usable products.
At Evashred, we are all about adding another life to the waste stream, doing everything we can to divert as much waste from landfill as possible.
In the case of the shredded foam bales, they were broken down further for a variety of different applications such as manufacturing underlay. Processing the shreds with steam and extreme heat it was pressed into sheets and ultimately used to create bean bag filler.
After many years of use, this same EV110E shredder unit is still in operation, shredding on average 25 tonnes of product every day.
We would love the opportunity to talk to you about your shredder needs. Fill out this form https://forms.gle/8g415EEgKiqt4frq8 and we will be in touch.