Stay in New Orleans

Stay in New Orleans

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Each of the bins for tin cans, aluminum cans, mixed plastic, etc. faces onto another conveyor belt. Here are the rows of doors to the bins (now closed) with the conveyor belt that would carry away the result for compacting into bales. In this picture the conveyor belt is loaded with cardboard. At other times it has newspapers, aluminum cans, .... There is a 'downstairs' crew who sorts through the cardboard or newspapers pulling out unacceptable material. I thought their job might be more interesting as they do different things during the day, but one day we were under staffed and one of the 'downstairs' guys joined us. He was happy to work 'upstairs' as their sorting can be really hard on the back, always walking through cardboard and such and reaching down to pick out stuff.... I guess the grass is always greener....
The bins are open at the other end (shown here). The have a large Bobcat (four wheel front end loader) which pushes the material onto the conveyor belt when the doors are open. Also, when they empty the bins they are even fuller than shown and the 'downstairs' crew gets to use rakes to keep the material separate and brooms/shovels to completely empty the bin at the end.
Here is the large Bobcat. I mostly see the Bobcat using its jaws to grab mixed cardboard (beyond my milk jug bin) and move it onto the conveyor belt for compacting. A previous view had shown my view of the mixed cardboard area when it was really full (hardly any room for the Bobcat to work then).
Here is a 10 second video of bobcat pushing sorted cans further into bin (200K, about 1 minute download) to make more room for more cans. As it gets later in the day, this has to be done more often as there is less space for new material. In those cases we often won't be able to see the Bobcat (as it is underneath our walkway), but just see the material in the bin rise up as new material is pushed further into the bin. It looks really cool.	If your browser is not set up to show movies you will get an error dialog box instead of a player and can just press cancel.
That conveyor belt carries whatever is on it up to the compactor shown here. There is actually a person in the little area above and to the left who is running the compactor (hard to see as the plastic enclosing the work area is not very translucent). Here they are compacting cardboard (unusually backed up at the top) which comes out as bales on the bottom left. This is the view from the end of the mixed recyclables line.
Here is another view of the compactor. It is compacting office paper here. This is the view you would see directly in front of you as you came in the main entrance via the garage style door at the center of the building.
Here is a 5 second video (120K, about 40 second download) of the compactor in action. The building is not shaking, but rather my hand is not as steady as I would like when taking this video. That is a problem with vidoes. What to do?	If your browser is not set up to show movies you will get an error dialog box instead of a player and can just press cancel.
The bales of recyclable materials are stacked with a fork lift until a tractor trailer is loaded to take them to a facility which can use them. Here is a five second video (120K, about 40 seconds to download) of the fork lift moving a cardboard bale). It really needs to be truncated to about three seconds as I didn't stop the recording when I wanted to.	If your browser is not set up to show movies you will get an error dialog box instead of a player and can just press cancel.
To the left of the compactor is a storage area for bales before they get loaded onto trucks and taken away. You can see the edge of the compactor on the right edge of the picture. This is the view of the holding area you would see to your left as you come in the main entrance with the compactor directly in front of you.
Newspapers are stored behind the building as with the mixed recyclables and the small Bobcat puts them up on the conveyor belt shown here.
The newspapers come into the main building here. The sign says 'Clean news is the key to our success, please remove plastic, trash, books or magazines, brown paper, wet paper.
From there it drops onto the same conveyor belt to the compactor/baler as shown previously. However, this is where the extraneous material is removed by the 'downstairs crew'.
Here is a 5 second video (120K, about 40 second download) of the downstairs crew removing extraneous items from newspapers. There are two guys on the up ramp and they threw things in front of me as I was taking the video (heh, they were working and I was on break). It helps you understand why 'downstairs' work is less desirable.	If your browser is not set up to show movies you will get an error dialog box instead of a player and can just press cancel.