Material Handling Supplement -- Welcome

There is “more than one way to skin a cat,” the cliché goes, and it is a saying that can be applied to moving material from one point to another.

A survey of recycling facilities, conducted by this publication two years ago, revealed a wide range of mobile material handling equipment being used at scrap yards and material recovery facilities (MRFs).

As the decade has progressed, the recycling industry has seen large companies with deep pockets press the issue of economies of scale.

This hasn’t necessarily meant that every scrap facility is a “super yard,” or that all MRFs are high-volume plants. But it has meant that most operators are at the very least competing with one of these larger facilities that can afford larger (and often newer) processing, sorting and material handling equipment.

If they weren’t already aware of such considerations as cycle times and lifting capacity, plant operators are now well-versed.

Making buying decisions on material handling machines (and attachments) is a complicated process, and it isn’t necessarily becoming easier. Each year brings additional advancements and innovations from manufacturers, adding to the wealth (or perhaps glut?) of information available to prospective buyers.

The 1999 Recycling Today Material Handling Equipment Guide is our attempt to sort through much of that information and compile the best of it into a reference guide.

The features in this year’s guide offer a look at the most widely used mobile material handling machines—forklifts, skid steer loaders, wheel loaders, and large scrap handlers—and their common applications at recycling facilities.

Certainly, manufacturers of all the machines can cite reason why their equipment is ideal for a given task. Processors also check in with their views on why a given machine best suits their needs.

By no means is it all-encompassing, but we believe some of the more common compare-and-contrast questions asked by material handling equipment shoppers are addressed in the guide.