Compactor

Article summary

A compactor is a machine or mechanism used to reduce the size of material such as waste material or biomass through compaction. A trash compactor is used in business and public places like hospitals (and in the United States also in homes) to reduce the volume of trash they produce. A baler-wrapper compactor is used for making compact and wrapped bales in order to improve logistics. Normally powered by hydraulics, compactors take many shapes and sizes. In landfill sites for example, a large tractor (typically a converted front end loader with some variant of a bulldozer blade attached) with spiked steel wheels called a landfill compactor is used to drive over waste deposited by waste collection vehicles (WCVs). WCVs themselves incorporate a compacting mechanism which is used to increase the payload of the vehicle and reduce the number of times it has to empty. This usually takes the form of hydraulically powered sliding plates which sweep out the collection hopper and compress the material into what has already been loaded. Different compactors are used in scrap metal processing, the most familiar being the car crusher. Such devices can be of either the "pancake" type, where a scrap automobile is flattened by a huge descending hydraulically powered plate, or the baling press, where the automobile is compressed from several directions until it resembles a large cube

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