A new baler for a new material stream

The ever-changing makeup of single-stream recycling materials and overall increasing tonnages prompted Shakopee, Minnesota-based family-owned solid waste and recycling company Dem-Con Cos. to install a new baler in September 2024.

“The single stream in general … year over year it just keeps growing,” Dem-Con Facilities Manager Tim Ries says. “We were at a point where we would end up here until 3 [or] 4 o’clock in the morning to finish up baling, especially during the holiday season.”

Particularly, Dem-Con’s material recovery facility (MRF) in Shakopee was seeing increased volumes of old corrugated containers (OCC).

“We used to see the blip during the holidays and we could handle that surge, but now at any given time, you go out to look at the pile and you’re not sure if it’s commercial or a residential mix, but just the amount of OCC in the pile was a driving factor,” Director of MRF Operations Lonnie Pauly says. “We had to get another machine in there.”

After considering several options, Dem-Con eventually chose a Konti 600 cross-tie baler from German equipment company Kadant PAAL, which has North American headquarters in Lebanon, Ohio.

Standout features of the Konti 600, according to Kadant PAAL, include an optimized knife, stamper and channel design; modern axial piston pumps with low drive power; an advanced positional ram measurement system; an automatic tying system using steel or polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, wire; and real-time access to the baler’s performance and operational data provided by the PAALconnect app.

The company also highlights several benefits of its Konti product line, including high throughput and bale weights, low energy consumption, easy access to the tying unit, simple operation and maintenance and low total cost of ownership.

Redundancy also was top of mind for Dem-Con, which uses a smaller, two-ram baler to process containers, and Pauly says with this latest installation, the MRF has redundancy for both fiber and containers in one machine.

“We looked at multiple balers and we came down to a [Konti 600] because we were looking to mostly [bale] fiber with it and they have the cross-tie function, which really led us towards that baler because we want redundancy in baling plastics and all materials through it,” Ries adds.

“The big thing for me was the cross-tie [function]. Most single-rams typically can’t [process] containers very well, so you have the cross tie for containers and the bale really holds together. … It’s been a game-changer for us.”

The simple operation and maintenance also sold Ries on the Konti 600.

“Typically, to reline a baler like that, you’re looking at four days,” he says. “With this baler, we can probably cut that in half because the wear plates are bolted in and not welded … It was fairly easy to pick up, from greasing it to checking the knives, tensions in the chains and everything else.”

And since the baler’s installation last September, Ries says the machine has been “running strong,” adding, “Since September, we pushed a lot of material through it and it hasn’t skipped a beat.”