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For many years we had owned and operated mobile crushing and screening plants for concrete recycling. Our fleet consisted of primary and secondary crushers, triple-deck screener, conveyors, maintenance truck, operators and a mechanic. The fleet allowed us to process concrete at our permanent yard and at demolition job sites.
We were finding that the volume of material we were crushing did not warrant the continued expenditures of maintaining the fleet. It was not that the overall volume of concrete we encountered on jobs was not there. The volume of material we were able to process with our own equipment was trending downward. A variety of reasons, including job-site limitations, and transportation costs of local disposal versus the costs of bringing material to our permanent yard facility, highlighted the decline in volume that we were seeing. Without being able to process on site, transportation costs became a deciding factor in taking advantage of an opportunity to sell our crushing fleet.
Being able to crush concrete for site re-use is a big WIN-WIN for our demolition projects. The obvious need to crush concrete led us to look closely at bucket crushers as a means to accomplish this task.
Having seen bucket crushers displayed recently at World of Concrete, it became apparent that a new generation of technology was improving the bucket crusher capabilities. We requested a demonstration from our Genesis representative to try an HBC 1250, which is properly-sized to match with our fleet of 480E Volvo
excavators. At our concrete recycling yard, we had a stockpile of pulverized concrete, which we sized to 12” minus to remove most reinforcing and allow consistent feeding of the bucket crusher. We pre-weighed a stockpile of 75 tons of this material for the bucket crusher trial. In 45 to 50 minutes, the sample pile had been crushed to 3” minus sizing. This translated to a production volume of over 500 tons per day. This sizing is usually quite acceptable to be used for fill requirements on a job site. We were very pleased with the production rate and quality of crushed material that was produced.
We purchased the Genesis HBC 1250 bucket crusher and have used it to process thousands of tons of material in our yard and job sites. The simplicity of use has been most impressive. The bucket crusher is like any other interchangeable attachment that we utilize when we need it. The economics of processing on site versus off site transportation and disposal costs is very favorable, especially if the crushed product being created replaces imported fill for site needs.
Pulverizing and downsizing of concrete pieces to remove overhanging reinforcing is critical. Oversized feed stock dramatically reduces productivity and defeats the whole concept of the bucket crusher. Material preparation is no different from what we always did to feed a jaw crusher when making a quality end product.
We have found the bucket crusher to be an extremely useful tool in our demolition arsenal. It provides quality finished product at a very favorable cost.
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