Thinking of baling plastic at your location to ship to us? Let us share some helpful information with you!
One customer tried using a round baler to roll it up. First, few companies can unroll or shred a round bale of plastic. It needs to be fed in by “slices”. Second, the bale started to melt along the edges and started to smoke and became a very dangerous situation!
We have had a customer bring in small square bales such as what is seen above. The problem with this bale right off the bat is that there is 5 different materials in there with very different melt points, chemical make-up, and end use possibilities! The correct way to do this would be to bale the 4 materials ( strings, bale wrap, bunker cover, and softener salt bags) as separate bales. Dispose of the net wrap, as it is not recyclable. However……
CAUTION! This is extremely dangerous!!! Using these machines to bale plastic is asking for trouble!
Plastic being fed into the baler can move fast even with the tractor at idle. It can wrap around a person’s leg without their knowledge as they are concentrating on feeding the baler. Trust us! We know as we have done it ourselves! We wanted to see if this would be a option for our customers. Then there is the fire risk!
We don’t want to hear of a customer having a fire, injury, or worse yet a fatality due to trying to pre-bale. Please just keep it sorted, clean, and dry as you generate the material. Storage methods can be found in an earlier post. You may contact us for other options available or share what you have found to be a simple storage method! Be safe!