After the Blast - Crushing/Recycling
Once the elevators have been imploded, the broken rubble is recycled into fill and road building material. Steel is separated from the rubble and sent to a scrap yard for recycling.
While the blasting involved mostly small amounts of explosive, lots of back work, and a bit of brain power, the crushing and recycling part of the job mostly involves BIG machines.
Heavy equipment is used to remove the steel from the debris pile, pick the broken concrete from the pile, haul it to a crusher, crush it down to useful sizes, and place it in piles. Other machines are used to pulverize smaller remaining walls at the basement perimeter which were not destroyed in the blast.
A mining sized front shovel and an excavator are used to pull concrete from the piles.
An excavator with a grapple is used to load steel scrap for recycling while another with a pulverizer attachment separates concrete from steel straps.
A jaw type crusher is used to crush the larger concrete pieces down to a usable size.
The crusher is fed raw concrete with an excavator. The feed hopper for the crusher vibrates and slowly feeds the material into the crushing jaw. There are a series of bars just before the crushing jaw that allow the smaller material to fall through and bypass the jaw. This saves on wear on the jaw face.
The finished crushed concrete comes off the bottom of the crushing jaw and is carried to a pile by the stacking conveyor. Until the end of the year we used a fixed 75' stacker which would make a 500 ton pile of crushed material before it reached the top and a large bulldozer shoved the pile to the side.
It only takes several hours to make a pile of 500 tons of material so we added a new 100' radial stacker. The radial stacker is mounted on wheels and can rotate as the pile grows larger. We can produce up to 30,000 tons of material now before the conveyor has to be moved.
Previously we used a both a 2 cubic yard and a 4 cubic yard front end loader to pick up and move material. We recently added a 10 cubic yard machine which will increase our production dramatically.
