FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Finding a New Home 5

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t the end of the 1990s, life was getting really busy. There weren’t enough hours in the day to do all the things I wanted to. Recycling was back on the agenda in a big way, and it was something I knew and cared a good deal about. If we were going to do it, we were going to do it right. I needed the best available plant, and I needed somewhere to put it. To recycle aggregate, you need a crusher, and there are essentially two types of crusher: jaw crushers (including gyratory or cone crushers) and impact crushers. Roy and I had been looking at crushers for a few years now. We had been to BAUMA (the International Trade Fair for Construction Machinery and Equipment) a couple of times in 1995 and 1998, and we had visited some of the regional recycling stations in Germany and Austria. There were some pretty impressive operations in these places. In Düsseldorf, they had a crushing and screening process that was clean and quick, and the whole thing was operated remotely. Lorries came in and, at the press of a button, they would be filled with the material they required. There was nothing like that in the UK. I was getting very useful advice from Terry Stevens, a freelance consultant based in Tunbridge Wells. He recommended that we should get an impact crusher, which would produce a finer quality of aggregate. The problem was that the product would be 50 pence a tonne dearer than it would be with a jaw crusher. Which should we go for? There was no point in making up our minds until we had somewhere to put the thing.

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