In this article, Kelly Dallyn, general manager of corporate maintenance at Cascades Recovery, offers its input on what it keeps in mind when buying a new baler
From the website magazine.recyclingtoday.com:
Kelly Dallyn, general manager of corporate maintenance at Cascades Recovery, says the company’s oldest baler is a 1988 Macpresse MAC 110 at its facility in Rochester, New York. Macpresse is represented in North and South America by Sierra International Machinery, Bakersfield, California.
Cascades operates 19 facilities in Canada and New York. Dallyn says the company factors in each facility’s needs when buying a new baler as each plant has different monthly tonnages, which influence the type of baler that is needed. Some facilities receive more than 20 tons per hour, while others receive less than 100 tons per day. Also, some of the facilities operate three shifts, while others only operate one or two shifts.
Dallyn says the company’s larger facilities lean toward using balers such as the Macpresse MAC 111AS that can bale about 40 tons per hour of OCC. But in its smaller facilities, Cascades Recovery uses balers such as the Macpresse 106 single ram.
Cascades Recovery owns about 25 balers across its operations, not including downstroke balers and compactors. The company uses balers from a variety of manufacturers—American Baler, Bollegraaf, Harris, Machinex and Macpresse—but it most commonly uses the Macpresse MAC 111AS at its operations. The company has 10 of those machines at its plants.
“A few years ago, Macpresse changed its tiers to accommodate a double-wire system, which solved the issue of baling plastics and fixed the problem of wires breaking because of memory in the plastics,” he says, adding that the Macpresse MAC 111AS achieves high throughputs as well.
A few of the Cascades plants also process residential recyclables. In those plants, Dallyn says the company relies on Harris two-ram balers to handle containers. Most of those plants also have a Macpresse baler to handle recovered fibre if the infeed tonnage is large enough.
Programs are becoming more user-friendly and interactive. – Kelly Dallyn
By sticking to two main types of balers, Dallyn says Cascades’ plants can share an inventory of critical parts—main hydraulic cylinders, main motors, main pumps and programmable logic controllers (PLCs)—to ensure operations run efficiently.
Also, technicians can help each other out with troubleshooting issues. “My techs, they can console each other and collaborate if they have issues quicker with fewer baler types,” he adds.
It lets us find a solution to eliminate non-baling time. We can go into the program, and it will give us all the faults that have happened so we can analyze why it stopped working. – Kelly Dallyn
Within the past five years, Dallyn says new balers incorporate new electronic features, such as data tracking. Electronic tools alert operators to baler issues that must be fixed and help technicians investigate mechanical problems.
Here’s a preview of what they wrote about us:
The magazine recycling today
To find out more about the new MAC 111AS/1, you can consult the product page by clicking here and download the brochure.
