The Mechanics of Mining
An excavator or front end loader uncovers the landfilled materials and places them on a moving floor conveyor belt to be taken to the sorting machinery. A trommel is used to separate materials by size. First, a large trommel separates materials like appliances and fabrics. A smaller trommel then allows the biodegraded soil fraction to pass through leaving non-biodegradable, recyclable materials on the screen to be collected.
An electromagnet is used to remove the ferrous material from the waste mass as it passes along the conveyor belt.
A front end loader is used to move sorted materials to trucks for further processing.
Odour control sprayers are wheeled tractors with a cab and movable spray arm mounted on a rotating platform. A large reservoir tank mounted behind the cab holds neutralising agents, usually in liquid form, to reduce the smell of exposed wastes.
Read more about this topic: Landfill Mining
Famous quotes containing the words mechanics and/or mining:
“the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry
And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)