Our customers are often faced with the issue of disposal at the end of service life of products. Waste is generated during the manufacture of cables and when cables are scrapped. For economical and environmental reasons, recycling and/or recovery of the material components from this waste is essential.
We supply more than 100,000 wood drums annually across Australia. We recycle thousands of wooden drums every year.
Customers can return empty wooden drums to our cut-to-length facilities. We reuse the empty wooden drums to complete cut-to-length jobs and rewind cables from damaged drums. We offer empty wooden drums, which are too small or big in size for cut-to-length jobs, to local drum recyclers.
Some wooden drums in shipping containers may be damaged in transit or by forklift tines during unpacks. Our warehouse team fixes repairable damage instead of disposing damaged wooden drums. This reduces the usage and wastage of timber in production of our wooden drums.
Cable waste comes from :-
Cable production
End of the functional life of the cables
Scrapped cables from when they are no longer in use
The waste can comprise of a multitude of components such as metals, plastics, rubber, paper and glass fibers.
Waste that is generated during cable manufacturing is sorted at the source and either reprocessed or recycled for alternative applications. Waste from end of life and scrapped cables constitute a broader mix of material components. A pre-sorting of these cables is made, followed by granulation and separation of the plastics from the metals.
The metals may be sent to refining companies. The main plastic components PVC and polyethylene may be sold to secondary converters for a variety of applications. The fluoropolymer may be cleaned and extruded into pellets for secondary applications.
Midland Metals is committed to comply with the requirements of Vinyl Council of Australia and Green Building Council of Australia’s guidelines for recycling cables. We advise our customers to engage waste management and recycling companies to help with end-of-life management of PVC insulated power cables. Customers may contact us directly for recommendations on organizations that can assist them for their specific waste management and recycling needs.