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Special Section - Packaging

On-Site System Cleans, Crushes, Shreds Drums
One user estimates its machine will pay for itself within six months

As container users grapple with increased environmental demands, equipment to recondition and recycle drums and pails in-house is growing in popularity, notes Jerry Anderson, president of Production Systems, Inc., Marietta, Ga. His company provides modular systems which do everything from deheading and cleaning drums, pails and special containers, to crushing and shredding the resulting metal for reuse.

Priced from a few thousand to over a million dollars, these custom designed systems are considered a good investment by their users. Their initial cost and cost of operation may be only a fraction of the disposal costs for some containers, particularly those holding a residue of hazardous materials. "We have one customer who tells us the machine will pay for itself within six months," remarks Anderson. "And that's an $800,000 machine."

A container exits a PSI system as either a reconditioned container for reuse, a failed container for disposal, or as a crushed or shredded material for recycling.

Typically, a drum's trip through the system begins with removal of its top. Then the drum is rotated and the contents dumped. Next, its inside is washed with a low pressure but high volume washing stream of the material it had been carrying. "This knocks loose any foreign material that might be stuck to the side of the drum," explains Anderson. "At this point, you have a nearly clean drum."

The drum is then rotated into an opposite chamber. "Here we use a high pressure wand in the 1,500-3,000 pounds per square inch range, washing that steel with fresh solvent or water depending on what the stream needs to be," relates Anderson. "This gives us completely clean steel." Finally, depending on what the customer wants, the container can either be pressure tested for reuse, or sent on for crushing and shredding.

The test subjects the container to 5 psi of pressure for 15 seconds. Drums that pass are okay for reuse.

Longtime Experience
PSI introduced its first Multifunctional Container Handling System in 1990. For 15 years previous, the company had made conveyors and other material handling machinery, a business in which it remains active. During those 15 years PSI "learned how to handle a number of things, all the way from sugar coated chocolate candies at 1,000 pounds per minute to nuclear waste in 55 gallon drums," recalls Anderson.

Its nuclear waste handling experience included the design and manufacture of drum handling systems. "From there," says Anderson, "it was a natural for use to continue the development of systems for 55 gallon containers."

When hazardous waste problems became a national concern, PSI conveyor systems came into high demand for bringing drums from the field of decanting (draining). "We talked with people at both ends of the systems - where the stuff was coming from originally, and what they would do with it once it got to the site," remembers Anderson. "Their plans were very, very primitive. They had no plan for how to automate the various ends of the system."

Design Consideration
Rather than limit involvement to delivery of its conveyor systems, PSI began to develop a system to handle the entire process. "It was pretty successful from the start," recalls Anderson. "There was a lot of interest, and not many people were involved, except consultants, and they weren't manufacturing anything."

While it may have been a natural progression from its nuclear waste handling days, this does not mean the task of designing the first PSI Multifunctional Container Handling System itself was simple. One of the most difficult to design features of the system, says Anderson, was the entrance airlock. "We had to create an inert atmosphere because when you dump some of these items, there are all sorts of solvents and organic materials that are likely to catch fire or explode," he explains.

Two main considerations were: (1) making an airlock in which a drum could be opened, and (2) blanketing the whole area with inert gas, such as nitrogen. This keeps the oxygen content at a level where it won't support combustion. The speed of the system depends to some extent on how quickly the oxygen content can be reduced to a safe level.

Market Outlook
An unusual aspect of the system is the lid cutter, which works effectively even when opening old drums which have bends and dents which can make uniform cutting difficult for other types of cutters.

Anderson believes that as container users come to recognize the cost benefits of proper disposal, PSI's systems will find wider and wider usage. Anyone with "a lot of clean up requirements" needs it, he feels, including chemical plants which are "winding up with a lot of drums that aren't clean by Environmental Protection Agency standards."

Keen interest in the system is coming from the mining industry, observes Anderson. "In the mining business, they have lots of hydraulic machinery on their sites," he notes. "So they go through a lot of hydraulic fluid." As a result, up and down many of the mountains in mining states are scattered 55 gallon drums which "at one time contained hydraulic fluids, gear lubricants, and light motor oils," says Anderson. "Each one of those drums holds a gallon to a gallon and a half of product that it's just not practical to drain out because of the way they were used."

These littered hillsides are stirring up concern by the EPA and the lubricant manufacturing industry, says Anderson. "As a result," he remarks, "we may be involved in building a portable plant that you can put on a flatbed trailer and haul back to a site to process drums, shred metal, and salvage whatever lubricants were there." This is still only in discussion at this point, but it could be on the design tables soon.

- By Heather Hydrick