Thursday, July 09, 2009

Improvements at the Site



We are always trying to offer our clients a better product. In the early days that meant perfecting our process. Then we had electricity installed. After 13 years we have picked the low hanging fruit and are now able to work on some of the minutiae.

One of the ongoing issues for us is trash. From day one, we have worked to educate people what constitutes contamination. Whether through ignorance or maliciousness, we battle trash every day. Part of the problem comes from our permits: we are registered with the NMED as a composting facility, not a solid wasted facility. Technically, if we accept trash, we are in violation of our permit to operate. But the more realistic reason for curtailing trash is that it presents visual, and to an extent, actual evidence that we don't take the care that we claim to take. And lastly, trash pisses me off. This is my home away from home and to have people not see that and treat the site like a dump bums me out.

So, Misch has been working on a trash vacuum to remove trash from the product as it goes over the screens. The screening process is the last piece of the puzzle for our finished Premium Compost. But screening is the just the beginning for other products: Forest Floor Mulch, Topsoil Blend, Screened Mulch, new piles of Premium Compost, etc.



Basically what we have now is a vacuum, connected on one side to a vent, and on the other side to a cyclone that separates air from trash. The vent side is located below the conveyor so that just as the "overs" shoot off the conveyor, the vacuum sucks the lighter stuff, i.e. plastic, out of the stream. Plastic then goes into the cyclone where air is jettisoned out the top and the captured contaminates drop out the bottom to be disposed of in a conventional fashion.

A very simple concept really. But it has taken aver a year to design and build, countless man- hours and thousands of hard earned dollars. It is one way of reducing our costs so that we don't have to raise our prices. Enjoy.

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