material through the partition and drops it into the colourizer. Once coloured, the mulch is either bagged or shipped in bulk in two walking floor trailers that the company owns. Bagging is done on a semi-automatic Verville bagging line that was bought used in 2008. Workers stack the bags onto pallets, which are sealed using a SIAT Paklet pallet wrapping ma-chine. The pallets are stored outdoors or in old rail boxcars. mulch markets AboVE: The current semi-automatic bagging and pallet-izing system is fairly labour intensive, so the company is looking to upgrade to a fully automated system. RIGht: Ken Hamman, managing director of Ecco Waste Systems (left), and Ian Traquair, sales and mar-keting manager for Ecco Chips (right), show the biomass-heated boiler. “Tonnage-wise, probably 40% of the land-scape mulch is bagged, and 60% is bulk,” says Traquair. “Bags are where the profit is. Bulk is where the volume is. So there’s a nice kind of a balance.” The company is hoping to upgrade to a fully automat-ed bagging and palletizing line by fall of 2011. “If we see the same savings with a fully automated system that we saw with the colourizer, I can go for a pay raise,” laughs Traquair. Ecco currently produces about 5,000 tonnes/year of landscape mulch. It’s shipped to independent garden centres and bulk distributors, from Thunder Bay, Ontario, to Vancouver Island, British Co-lumbia. All interprovincial trucking is done by commercial carriers. The com-pany produces another 5,000 tonnes/ year or so of fine, screened mulch that’s used for animal bedding, particularly for feedlots. The coloured mulch mar-ket is very seasonal, with about 70% of the product needing to be produced in the three months before the onset of spring. The rest of the coloured mulch is produced up until early fall. Producing mulch for the bedding market helps to fill in some of the coloured mulch down-time, says Traquair. Ecco also does some co-bagging of DEHYDRATION SYSTEMS ROTARY DRUM DRYERS Baker-Rullman Triple-Pass Technology remains the superior dehydration system by optimizing operating costs, efficiency, and end product consistency. n n n n Wood Pellets Ag Products Municipal Waste Bio Mass Call: (920) 261-8107 email: [email protected] www.baker-rullman.com Baker-Rullman Manufacturing, Inc. 4 East Main Street • P.O. Box 67 Watertown, WI 53094 Canadian BIOMASS 19
Canadian Biomass July/August 2011: Page 19
