Practicing preventative tire maintenance can help keep waste fleets running smoothly and efficiently.
When it comes to ensuring the optimal performance of a waste collection fleet, routine tire management can play a crucial role in keeping trucks running effectively.
Given the harsh conditions collection vehicles face in their day-to-day operations, diagnosing tire wear issues early on can minimize costs and alleviate maintenance headaches for fleet managers that can occur when on-the-road issues such as flats and blowouts occur.
“Trash trucks in the waste industry get a lot more abuse on their tires than anything else, especially on a rear loader,” says Dominic Greco, fleet manager for Ivyland, Pennsylvania-based Leck Waste Services. “Typically, these trucks are going into cul-de-sacs and making hard turns all day long, so it’s creating a lot of damage on the tires.”
The strenuous nature of residential collection that includes constant turns and starts and stops can also affect the vehicle’s suspension, according to Greco.
“Because of all the twisting and dragging that the tires are doing, as well as the rocks and [other debris on the road], it just destroys the tires [when] compared to a front loader that is doing commercial work,” he says.
Harsh driving conditions, known as high-scrub applications, are a primary cause of tire wear on waste hauler trucks due to the abrasion that can result from daily operation and contact with curbs and debris on the road. To prevent excessive tire scrubbing, waste fleet tires are commonly designed with thicker sidewalls and tread compounds that are more resistant to abrasion. Additionally, these tires need to be durable because of the high torque demands placed on the tires from both the engine and the brakes.
The cost of these specially designed tires can go up to $1,000 a piece, which is why paying close attention to tire wear can help operators maximize the investment.
While some types of waste trucks—such as front loaders, side loaders and roll-offs—don’t usually experience as much daily wear as rear loaders, Greco stresses it is still important to carry out frequent inspections of these vehicles to improve tire life.
A general rule of thumb in the waste industry is to slightly overinflate tires to prevent truck squat, or truck sag, with heavier loads. Without taking this measure, misalignment can cause an uneven tire footprint, thus deceasing the vehicle’s fuel mileage.
Additionally, by eliminating truck sag in this way, operators can help prevent friction issues that occur when tires are under heavy loads.
“As the truck is loaded, the inside and outside tires start to rub together which [creates] heat and can cause blowouts,” says Greco. “The only way to solve that is to increase your tire pressure. So, if the tire calls for 90 pounds per square inch (PSI), we’re going to run 110 PSI in them.”
In addition to regularly checking tire pressures, Greco says Leck has also set up a preventative maintenance program for more thorough inspections.
“Trucks come in roughly every two weeks to two and a half weeks to get greases, tires checked, lights checked, etc.,” he says. “What we’re looking for when we’re inspecting the tires is any cuts in the sidewalls, the treads getting damaged, improper inflation, the valve stems [being intact] and cracked rims on the tires. We inspect the tires completely inside and out.”
Most sidewall damage can be credited to driving in tight urban areas where scrubbing or curbing is common. While most waste haul tires can withstand some curbing—usually through protective curb ribs—excessive curbing can cause an effect called pinch shock, which can result in a crimped core.
“We don’t dismount the tires or anything like that, but we do [inspect them] on an outside visual,” says Greco. “Based on how the tire is placed on the truck, we’ll check for tread separation, tread depth and inflation. If we find excessive wear on them, especially regarding the tread, we will pull the tires off before [the tread] hits 5/32 [of an inch.]”
He adds, “The program that we run here, if we have two tires that are within 3/32 [of an inch] from where we’re supposed to pull them off, we always do the entire axle. We never just replace two tires; it’s always the entire axle.”
According to Greco, tire rotation also plays a considerable role in the regular maintenance of a fleet’s tires.
“When you’re doing your service on the trucks and you’re taking a look at your tire wear, one tire could be wearing more than the other, depending on how much the truck is turning and what the truck is doing,” he says. “So, what we do is we’ll take the tires off and we’ll put them from the driver’s side to the passenger side and vice versa.”
Greco says that being vigilant on keeping up with a tire rotation schedule can help ensure the tires wear evenly, while also extending their life.
By practicing routine preventative maintenance on a fleet’s tires, Greco says the long-term benefits can be substantial for haulers.
“Keeping up with proper care of your tires really saves in the long run with the wear and tear on your tires, but with the mechanical parts that are on the truck, as well,” he says. “When tire maintenance is neglected, uneven wear can cause significant harm to gears and other internal mechanics.
“If you have tires that are almost bald on one side, and then you have fairly new tires on the other side, the smaller diameter compared to the bigger diameter will cause all your gears and everything that is in the rear to fight against each other,” Greco says.
If tire maintenance is continually delayed, Greco warns that sustaining a fleet can become a considerable expense.
“If you neglect your tires or are not inspecting them the way that you should, it gets pretty expensive,” he says. “We’ve probably saved close to $40,000 with how we do our tire programs here compared to if we just let the truck go and did not do anything with them.
“One of the consequences you have [in neglecting tire maintenance] is you’ll spend an astronomical amount of money, especially when you consider you’re taking the chance of ruining a brand-new tire or ruining your casing.”
In addition to regularly checking the fleet, Greco says Leck works to train drivers on ways to extend the life of their tires.
“You’ve got some drivers out there, and they just take sharp turns if they’re making a standard left turn or right turn. By taking the turn a little bit wider to extend your steering radius, you’re not putting as much wear and tear on the tires,” he says.
While there are a number of causes of tire wear, responsibility for upkeep doesn’t just fall on one person’s shoulders. Adopting a comprehensive maintenance and training program can help get everyone in the organization on the same page when it comes to protecting vehicles and maximizing a truck’s ROI.
This article originally ran in the May/June issue of Waste Today. The author is the assistant editor of Waste Today and can be reached at hrischar@gie.net.
International Recycling Week, June 21-24, features metals, paper, plastic and C&D programming.
Recyclers and secondary commodity traders around the world will have access to presentations and programs presented online at no charge during International Recycling Week, June 21-24.
The four-day online event is being presented by Dubai, United Arab Emirates- (UAE-) based Waste & Recycling Middle East & Africa magazine, with support from the Recycling Today Media Group.
The conference begins on Monday, June 21, with paper and board recycling programming, followed by plastics recycling content on June 22, metals recycling programming on June 23, and construction and demolition (C&D) materials recycling ending the week on Thursday, June 24.
Among the companies represented at the sessions and roundtable discussions during the four-day event are:
More information on the free event can be found on this web page, or those wishing to register can go directly to this web page.
By automating the metal recycling process, the company says recyclers can reduce worker risks associated with manual handling, feeding and cutting.
According to Alpena, Michigan-based Amos Manufacturing Inc., a U.S. manufacturer of industrial shredding and separation equipment, transforming large scrap metal sheets and materials into a manageable size for further processing requires “smart” shredding solutions.
By automating the metal recycling process with the addition of a shredder, the company says recyclers can reduce worker risks associated with manual handling, feeding and cutting of large metal sheets.
To help optimize the recycling process, Amos says it provides a full range of shredding technology, including the 125 HP Dual Shaft Shredder. Each shredder is custom-built based on the requirements of the application and can be tailored to accommodate the feeding, shredding and conveyance of material, according to the company.
The 125 HP Dual Shaft Shredder features a low speed, high torque cutter design that is designed to “shred metal with ease and efficiency, reducing the particle size and providing consistency for further processing and more efficient handling.” This also allows for an increase in the density of scrap material per dumpster, cutting costs associated with otherwise frequent and premature waste transportation, says Amos.
Amos adds that its shredders can reduce volume and create more consistently sized material that increases efficiency for additional downstream operations. The company offers shredders from 1 HP to 400 HP and beyond, with a wide selection of industrial shredders for a variety of applications.
For more information about Amos Mfg.’s 2 and 4 shaft shredders, visit here.
Coastal Waste and Recycling meets its mixed material processing goals with screening technology from General Kinematics.
Since first beginning operations in early 2018, Pompano Beach, Florida-based Coastal Waste and Recycling has been making significant investments in its mixed waste processing infrastructure.
With three newly constructed mixed waste material recovery facilities (MRFs) located in Broward County, Palm Beach County and Martin County, the company has positioned itself to capitalize on favorable conditions in the southeastern Florida market.
“We look for markets, in general, where there are a lot of large companies, high amounts of population growth or just existing large populations. [This is] because there’s always construction, reconstruction and demolition, and in areas like southeast Florida … there’s nowhere for [the resulting waste] to go,” says Brendon Pantano, CEO of Coastal Waste and Recycling.
“Rebuilding is a major part of the economy down here, and Florida is one of the few states that has overall construction waste percentages that are [roughly] 35 to 40 percent, and it has been like that for decades,” he adds.
According to Pantano, these factors—as well as limited landfill capacity in the area—made southeast Florida an obvious location to construct and operate its mixed waste processing facilities.
The start of Coastal’s mixed waste operations began with the opening of its first facility in Pompano Beach, known as “Coastal Four.” The company obtained a permit and developed construction plans to build the Class III MRF in August 2018 with the intention of processing construction and demolition (C&D) debris and mixed commercial recycling.
Given the company’s varying waste streams, large volumes and high growth ambitions, Pantano says the facility needed a dynamic system to successfully process both lightweight and heavyweight material.
“A lot of times that [shift in material] can pose a challenge to typical C&D processing systems because they’re not designed to flow lightweight cardboards, as well as construction materials and commercial recycling byproducts. So, it was a challenge to find [the right] screen,” he says.
In addition to handling Coastal Four’s diverse waste stream, the company needed screening technology capable of separating a heavy flow of aggregates.
“Being in Florida, the amount of fines and concrete in our material versus say a facility up North is [substantially larger] because everything down here is built with concrete block [rather than wood]. So, you end up with a lot of dirt and broken-down concrete,” Pantano says.
To aid in his search for a uniquely robust screening system, Pantano reached out to Ian Levasseur, the vice president of Quebec, Canada-based Sherbrooke OEM, for guidance. Levasseur ultimately recommended a General Kinematics (GK) Finger-Screen 2.0 primary screen to meet Coastal’s requirements.
“We needed a screen that had a longer stroke capable of flipping and turning waste as it travels down the screen to ensure that smaller fractions of material didn’t surf their way into the larger fraction sorting lines,” says Pantano. “There aren’t many screen options when it comes to that throughput and material diversity, so the 2.0 was an obvious fit for us.”
After some initial discussions with the Crystal Lake, Illinois-based equipment manufacturer, Coastal also decided to invest in a GK Rod Deck as the secondary screen and a GK Single Knife De-Stoner Air Classifier.
At Coastal Four, Pantano says its processing operations begin with the Finger-Screen 2.0, where the machine separates the raw mixed waste into two lines.
“[With] the Finger-Screen 2.0, the whole objective there is to create a size separation. So, anything larger than 8 inches in size goes up to the A line for manual picking, and anything smaller than 8 inches goes over to the B line, which is a little more automated with some other machines to work through smaller material,” says Bob Huffer, team east regional sales manager for GK.
“By splitting the material flow, typically you see a 60-40 split on average, meaning 60 percent of the material stays with the A line and 40 percent, more or less, goes to the B line,” Huffer says.
According to Huffer, this allows the facility to utilize different technology to do a more thorough sorting process on the individual lines.
On the A line, Pantano says between eight to 12 sorters will pick through concrete, wood, cardboard, plastic, ferrous and nonferrous metal, and yard waste. Meanwhile on the B line, the 8-inch-minus material will first run through a magnet to remove ferrous metals then head to the secondary Rod Deck screen.
From there, the secondary fines screen will remove any material smaller than three-quarters of an inch to one inch. “[This material] is primarily a lot of the dirt and fines that’s just taken out and removed [from] the system to be used for landfill cover. Then what you’re left with is a fraction that is minus eight plus one, and that is then sent to the de-stoner, [which] separates the rock and the heavies,” Huffer says.
Utilizing air separation to separate the materials based on density, the de-stoner will blow away the light fraction, leaving behind the aggregates, crushed concrete, broken concrete, asphalt and clay tiles.
“The de-stoner is workhorse in there, and [Coastal’s] process really separates a lot of that aggregate material out,” says Huffer. “The remaining lighter materials, the minus eight plus one, just goes off the end of the de-stoner and goes to landfill, [whereas] with the aggregate fraction, Coastal now has a commodity that they can use and sell.”
Having worked in the waste industry his entire life, Pantano says the Finger-Screen 2.0 system is the only screening technology he’s witnessed capable of processing Coastal Four’s throughput and material composition.
“The amount of material agitation [with the 2.0] just leads to a good presentation of whatever is on the respective line. So, when you get the material on the A line, because it has that long stroke and that big active movement, you don’t end up with a piece of plywood covered in dirt that kind of skated down he line,” he says. “With some of the other screens that I’ve used, you get that effect where there’s a piece of cardboard and it’s a single-deck screen, so it doesn’t have the ability to flip it over or turn it. So, you end up having materials right on top of other materials because there’s not enough movement to get it to shake off.”
On average, Pantano says the current system is processing roughly 100 tons per hour, but that it can vary from anywhere between 90 to 105 tons per hour.
“[The system] is physically capable of, I suppose with the right conditions, up to 125 tons per hour. But, I’m sure we have hours where we do 200 tons per hour and we have an hour where we do 75 tons per hour; it’s just so dependent upon the material you put through,” he says. “The 2.0 is a monster. I mean, it is just a massive, massive piece of equipment. So, having a site that does that kind of volume is not typical. But I would say for any site that we’re going to have in that 800 to a thousand tons per day in one shift range, the 2.0 would be our choice.”
This article originally appeared in the May/June issue of Construction & Demolition Recycling magazine. The author is the assistant editor for Construction & Demolition Recycling magazine and can be reached at hrischar@gie.net.
KWS is a solid waste collection company serving customers in central New Jersey.
Interstate Waste Services Inc. (IWS) announced June 15 that it has acquired Kohler Waste Services Inc. (KWS) in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. Founded by Lynne and Kelly Kohler, KWS is a solid waste collection company serving residential and commercial customers primarily in the central New Jersey counties of Somerset and Hunterdon.
IWS is the largest privately held, vertically integrated provider of solid waste collection, transfer, recycling and disposal services serving the greater New York City and New Jersey markets. The KWS acquisition is the second this year for IWS within the central New Jersey market. According to the company, the acquisition builds upon its expansion efforts within the region.
"After 25 years and much consideration, KWS is excited to join the IWS family. We have been looking for a partner that shares the same customer values as we do for a long time and have finally found our perfect match," Lynne Kohler says.
As part of the acquisition, Lynne and Kelly Kohler will continue to be actively involved in sales, customer service and collection responsibilities for the company.
"We are pleased to welcome the KWS team," Mike DiBella, CEO of IWS, says. "In addition to expanding our collection footprint, the acquisition of KWS will drive additional volume into our rail-served BRI transfer station. The combination of continued growth in collection capabilities and internalization at our rail-served BRI location provides IWS a strong platform for future growth in New Jersey."