Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 5, 1993 TAG: 9306050729
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
Pallets are fine for painting pictures but not so great for landfills.
They're prolific - most things you buy were originally shipped on a wooden pallet - and often discarded after being used only once.
Then they rest uneasily underground, taking up too much space and rotting too slowly.
Until Friday, Virginia Tech had a monument to this environmental dilemma: About 1,000 pallets were piled near the school's landfill off Prices Ford Road.
"We generate a lot of them. They're a significant item in our waste stream," said Larry Bechtel, Tech's recycling coordinator.
"Until now, there's been nothing else to do with them," he added, nodding toward the mound.
Then Olathe arrived with a healthy appetite, a 9-foot mouth and no table manners.
All morning, Olathe - fed by a front-end loader - chewed up pallets, unconcerned with eating before a crowd. He belched sawdust and wood chips and excreted mince-mulch.
Even though Bechtel and other Tech officials had to dodge that digestive debris, they admired Olathe's performance as a possible means of responsibly disposing of excess pallets and other recyclable woody refuse.
"Everyday it seems like there's more pallets," said Billy Swain, Tech's buildings and ground superintendent. "We try to reuse them, but it's difficult."
"This is a good way of getting rid of them."
Olathe is not an ogre, but a 15,000-pound, 177-horsepower, $65,000 tub grinding machine brought here Friday for an exhibition.
Many industries and many localities - such as Montgomery County - have purchased similar machines to help them reduce landfill bulk and enhance recycling.
It's become too costly, both financially and environmentally, not to take such a step.
Landfills either charge high fees for taking pallets, or they won't accept them all.
In fact, disposing of pallets has become more expensive than making them, said John McLeod of Tech's Department of Wood Science and Forest Products.
McLeod, a research assistant, works in a lab specifically concerned with building the perfect pallet. Tech is one of few academic institutions with that mission.
Pallets are more important than most folks think, because about half of the hardwood timber cut annually is used to make them, McLeod said.
That's why Tech is focusing on pallets. "We're trying to make them more efficient and more durable with less wood," he said.
Olathe and his like are one good way to reduce waste, he said. Ground-up pallets take up less landfill space if buried.
Better still, the shavings can be used for mulch, mixed with municipal sludge to speed composting, or burned as boiler fuel. "There are a lot os potential uses," he said.
McLeod said Tech also is organizing a recycling network to ensure that pallets are reused instead of abandoned by their deliverers.
Olathe is hungry and waiting for discarded pallets. He can eat 400 per hour while separating and spitting out nails from the wood fiber, said Mike Clougherty, a sales representative who conducted yesterday's demonstration.
Tech seems to be receiving more pallets than ever, said Swain, and has fallen behind in efforts to reuse them.
The result has been the small mountain of pallets accumulating over the past two years at the school landfill.
Some of them were slated to be used last fall at the homecoming bonfire, but the idea instead of the pallets went up in smoke, Swain said.
Olathe's leavings will work very nicely as mulch at various places on campus, he said.
Hereafter, Tech might arrange a contract with Montgomery County for future pallets to be made into mulch by the county's tub grinder, he said.
The machine's price is a bit too steep for Tech's current budget, Swain said. "But I'd like to think somewhere down the line we could get one."
"There's no use throwing something away you can use."
by CNB