Recycling equipment appraisals are more and more common as the recycling facilities industry continues to grow. According to a recent study released by waste360, this industry has grown at an annual rate of 3.3% in the years since 2008, despite a slump in prices for recycled commodities during the recession.
The EPA compartmentalizes recyclable material into 10 piles, including the unavoidable “miscellaneous”: paper, food waste, yard waste, wood, textiles, rubber/leather, plastic, metal, glass, and, yes, miscellaneous, which weighs in at 8,630 tons of the 249,860 total tons of waste. But that weight, and those categories, only include MSW (municipal solid waste).
What’s not included in these numbers is construction and demolition debris, soil, industrial waste, or hazardous, medical, and radioactive waste, all of which also have to be managed, and all of which employee a variety of both general and specialized recycling equipment. For a look at a few interesting pieces of recycling equipment, you could visit our recycling equipment board on Pinterest.
Now, I’ve certainly never appraised radioactive waste recycling equipment, but I am familiar with the variety of equipment used in the recycling industry, some of which are general usage equipment such as cranes, dozers, forklifts, and other material handling equipment, along with trucks and trailers of various sorts, and truck scales. And then there’s the more specialized waste industry equipment! It’s here that the recycling equipment appraiser sometimes feels like a kid in the candy shop.
Some of the more specialized recycling equipment are tub grinders, tire shredders, tire cutters, cracker mills, granulators, horizontal grinders, wood hogs, balers, compactors, shears, trommel screens, vibratory screens, waste recyclers, wheeled landfill compactors, conveyors, picking and sorting stations, pallet grinders, pelletizers, and windrow turners.
Another area of recycling equipment appraisals includes peripheral recycling machines such as trommels, shredders, bag openers, glass cleanup and recycling systems, over belt magnets, eddy current separators and industrial can densifiers. And of course a variety of sorting systems: single-stream sorting, fiber sorting, C&D recycling, solid waste recycling, and waste-to-energy front-end sorting. Many of the sorting systems are customized for a business’ specific recycling niche and location, and more than a few of these recycling sorting systems include optical sorting equipment, not entirely unlike that used in agriculture!
A recycling equipment appraiser might also see heavy-duty shredders, chippers, grinders, wire liberation, screens, balers, material handling and transfer stations and complete systems for tires, scrap rubber, metals, paper, e-waste, plastics, salvage recycling and other recyclables. And don’t forget the recycling equipment used used in the landfill and wood industries such as mulch, timber, and composting operations. Logger baler, anyone?
All in all, getting a call to do a recycling equipment appraisal is always interesting. From small cardboard baler leasing companies to full scale mixed material recycling complexes with lines of optical sorting equipment, conveyers, and separators, the recycling industry continues to grow, expand, and innovate, providing a fascinating array of recycling equipment to appraise.
Jack Young, ASA, CPA
Recycling Equipment Appraiser
NorCal Valuation Inc.
