Horizontal Balers
Horizontal balers are one of two main structures industrial balers use to compress waste materials or byproducts to improve the ease of handling, transportation, storage, or recycling.
Quick links to Horizontal Balers Information
Applications of Horizontal Balers
The style of industrial baler is differentiated by the way material is loaded into and travels through the machine, either horizontally or vertically. While vertical balers are typically loaded from the top and tend to be more compact, horizontal balers take up more floor space and are used in larger facilities, producing high amounts of dense scrap.
Typical scrap materials that horizontal balers process include old corrugated cartons, non-ferrous scrap, textiles, newsprint, and aluminum cans. The automotive or packaging industries often utilize larger horizontal industrial balers to make the removal and transportation of scrap materials easier, along with such industries as packaging, industrial manufacturing, waste transfer, and recycling.
Horizontal Baler Design
Horizontal balers can be either open-ended or close-ended. Open-ended balers can offer automatic binding or manual binding, while close-ended balers generally require manual binding. The material is bound using wire, plastic, or string, and one bound is referred to as a bale and offers improved handling, disposal, transportation, or secondary processing versus the raw material. Horizontal balers can handle multiple materials at once and offer a higher throughput capacity, as well as more automated functions, than a vertical baler.
Horizontal balers typically have input areas, loading areas, on one side of the machine so that the material can travel to the other side in a horizontal motion. Horizontal balers may also have input areas on the top of the machine. Material can be loaded by hand, by conveyors or loader systems, or by air systems. The input area leads to a chamber where the material is pounded, smashed, or squeezed into a compact size. The compaction of the material can be powered through a hydraulic system, designed to minimize heat output and energy loss.
Benefits of Using Horizontal Balers
As recycling becomes more central to industrial and manufacturing processes, horizontal baling equipment will continue to play a central role in the process as well. Materials are baled and compacted in order to be shipped to recycling facilities to be reused in the production of future items within the same industry, such as scrap metal recycled into new sheet metal for car bodies.
An environmentally friendly process, most horizontal baler manufacturers offer extra information, like the horizontal baler’s carbon footprint or the machine’s total greenhouse gas emissions, so that consumers can be aware of their environmental impact. For high waste-producing industries, such as automotive manufacturing, the choice of compacting waste materials for recycling is also a matter of cost economy. Waste must be disposed of whether it is recycled or not, but recycling used materials for profit or for material recuperation provides an ROI on waste which would not have existed otherwise.