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Animal feed producers invest heavily in material handling equipment — particularly in systems designed for flowable materials. Ideally, grains and other flowable ingredients will remain within the automated line: Storage bins, conveyors, mixers, mills, crushers, pelleting machines, and, finally, baggers or other packaging systems.

Wood harvest bins have been the industry standard for decades, if not longer, but plastic harvest bins have been turning up in more and more fields as the seasons pass. Each material has advantages and disadvantages, but in the end, plastic is the clear winner — provided it’s the right sort of plastic.

Wineries have significant material-handling challenges at every step of the production process. Worse, the specific material-handling tasks vary throughout. In the field, users need rugged-terrain lift trucks that can lift and transport full harvest bins. Then, at the plant, staff needs some way to empty full bins — sometimes loaded with 1,000 pounds of fruit, or more — onto sorting tables.

It isn’t easy to obtain organic wine certification from the USDA. Just to illustrate the challenge, let’s look at a few statistics, courtesy of Wines&Vines magazine: While U.S.-made organic wine only made up 1 percent of sales by volume and 2 percent by value in 2017, European organic wine sales grew by between 10 and 20 percent from 2013 to 2016. Why this disparity?

There’s plenty of work to go around at a commercial composting facility. At a time when skilled work is hard to find, that creates staffing challenges for every compost producer. Besides, workers with skill and expertise in the day-to-day tasks of an industrial composting operation are rare in any labor market.

The success of a commercial composting operation rests on the ability to efficiently handle bulk materials. We know from studies of more conventional manufacturing facilities that material handling can contribute between 15 and 70 percent of operating costs — and it seems likely that composters will find themselves closer to the higher limit than the lower.

Between the holidays of Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, households produce an average of 25 percent more waste than at any other time of the year. Every week during the holiday season, we add 1 million tons of waste to the nation’s landfills. Clearly, municipalities and environmental agencies haven’t yet educated individuals in their communities on how to reduce waste, whether through diversion to recycling or composting operations or, better yet, reducing the volume of generated garbage in the first place.

 

Municipal holiday events are one of the year’s best community-building tools for cities and towns of every size. But when you gather large groups of people in outdoor spaces for a fabulous celebration, you create lots of waste. It’s the organizer’s job to handle all of that waste, gathering it from distinct collection points, bringing it to bulk hoppers, and hiring haulers to bring it to materials recovery facilities, city composters, or landfills.

In the hospitality industry, holidays lead to a significant uptick in companies booking parties. After all, every business needs a place to celebrate the year in review and look forward to the year to come. Typically, that place is a hotel ballroom.

For retailers, the holiday season brings more sales, more deliveries, and, as a result, more waste. The problem grows in step with a larger retail environment; last holiday season, retail sales beat predictions by 5.6 percent. Most surprisingly, brick-and-mortar sales grew faster than they had the previous year, suggesting that e-commerce isn’t necessarily ending in-person purchases any time soon.