Waste handling

Does your business need a container dumper? Odds are, the answer is yes. Hydraulic dumpers have the power to improve productivity, reduce injuries, and streamline mission-critical processes in a much wider variety of industries than you might think.

Thanks to the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), U.S. schools keep hungry students fed and ready to learn. The NSLP collects detailed records, which also makes it a valuable stand-in for the state of public and private school cafeterias more generally. If that’s true, then we’ve got a problem: School cafeterias are creating enormous amounts of food waste.

Whether they work at the elementary, high school, or collegiate level, all school janitors spend a lot of time handling garbage. This is a constant and repetitive task involving frequent bending and awkward postures. That is, it’s an ergonomic hazard.

First, the good news. Fatalities for refuse and recycling collectors declined to a rate of 34.1 per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers in 2016. This halted a troubling rise that began in 2012 and peaked at a rate of 38.8 injuries per 100,000 workers in 2015.

Too many sanitation workers end up injured — or worse — on the job. Refuse and recycling collectors have long been listed among the top five most dangerous occupations in the nation, but the problem extends along the entire waste stream.

Recycling scrap metal creates tremendous benefits for sustainability — at least on first glance. The situation gets more complex when you approach scrap recycling from a lifestyle perspective.

The recycling industry in the U.S. is in the midst of a dramatic overhaul. As the implications of China’s stringent contamination limits reverberate throughout the recycling ecosystem, residential recycling programs are particularly at risk.

Should your facility stock up on Brute bins, Slim Jims, wheelie bins, or open trash cans? And while we’re on the subject, what exactly is the difference between all these products?

Of all the transfer-station safety topics that concern waste-handling operations, one can do more to prevent all sorts of injuries than any other. We’re speaking, of course, about ergonomics. This science of efficiency at work can reveal the motions and tasks that lead to strain. That strain is a leading cause of workplace injury.

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.