Disposal of swarf

Good Morning People

Finally finished setting up my new (to me) lathe.. Lots of projects underway. Just one question how do you dispose of swarf? Standard rubbish, recycling?

ATB

JR

I bag mine up in industrial plastic bags then when I've got sufficient waste of all kinds, I take a trip to the recycling centre. If I'm getting short of bags (very rarely), I'll empty them and fill them up a 2nd or even 3rd time. 4 EU. for a car load of waste every few months won't break the bank.

Dave
The Emerald Isle

I put mine into empty, cleaned, food tins, and pound it down with apiece of 1.5" bar, before replacing the lid and hammering the side over to retain the lid.

The tins then go for recycling as scrap metal.

Howard

I fill up those decent sized paper carrier bags, tie it off at the top when full and chuck it into the recycling

The magnets/linear motors chuck it out at the recycling centre with the tin cans and aluminium

My M.E. club collects all scrap and weights it in, making about £800 per year towards club funds.

Brian

There is someone near where I live who collects scrap metal. I give him a call when I have a pile in strong refuse sacks (with aluminium drink cans thrown in to make it worth his while) and leave it out at an arranged time and date for him to pick up.

Martin C

There is a milling, turning and welding shop not far from where I live and the owner allows me to empty my bags of steel swarf and offcuts in his skip.

Thor

I understand that industry goes to some trouble to remove the cutting oil, etc from swarf.

How much difference does this contaminant make?

I cram it into rubble sacks and lob it in the skip at work. If I didn't have a slkip I'd put it in the front garden for a passing scrappy.

I registered with my local metal scrap dealer. It was easy and free to do. As i save or collect all my metal scrap and take it in from family & friends I make a profit a couple of times a year when I weigh it in. Old motors,batteries, copper, brass & wire scrap is weighed seperately & adds to the value. They pay direct onto my Visa card or cheque if needed.

regards

You can dispose of it in several ways, provided they are environmentally responsible, but I keep a plastic dustbin in the workshop into which all swarf and offcuts are tossed. When it's full I take it to the local waste facility and empty it into the scrap metal skip.

Our local tip has a skip for metal recycling, car bits, old bikes etc. I put mine in a smallish strong waste bin, when that's full I empty I pop to the tip and dump it in the skip.

I recycle my scrap in my local centre, they take almost everything and all for 2 Euro !

No excuse to dump anything in The Sunny South East !

Copper was about £5 a kilo scrap, brass I melt down and reuse.

I take anything with metal I can get from neighbours to a group of people with learning difficulties who pull it apart to recover the metal. It is both occupational therapy and gives them a small reward to keep the centre going. You might find such a group near you.

One of my last projects before retirement was the acquisition of a swarf compactor. The scrappy who was contracted to collect our swarf paid a significantly better price for clean compacted swarf compared to dirty "oily" uncompacted swarf, so we had a washing stage in the process. Interestingly (well, I thought so!) , the coolant which was drained from the swarf, was itself collected, filtered and cleaned, then reused. The Boss, who was a Yorkshireman was suitably impressed (as only a Yorkshireman can be impressed) that we could get a (modest) income stream from coolant collection and swarf compaction!

cheers

Bill

If you read the PM forum there are threads from commercial CNC machine shops discussing the cost of lost coolant even with centrifuges trying to wash swarf and recover it. When you think of the surface area of a ton of swarf even a monomolecular layer amounts to a lot of gallons of oil.

Thanks to both.

Interesting that the compaction is important, too.

There were many reasons for investigating the use of a compactor, 1/ We were filling up multiple skips per week with swarf. 2/ Said swarf being oily was dripping all over the area and causing concern because of groundwater contamination. Yes there is "groundwater" in South Australia, the driest State in the driest Continent!! 3/ Swarf had a fairly low recycling value, because it was dirty and low density.

The compactor ended up compacting the cleaned swarf to better than 90% of the density of the bar material, at least for the al.alloy swarf which was about 95% of the swarf generated. In fact the "pucks" generated by the compactor were machinable!! The scrappy liked it because instead of the 5 round trips of about 15km per week, they were able to make less than one trip per week, with many obvious benefits.

The recycler paid a premium for the compacted swarf, as it was clean and didn't require any operations (like cleaning) before dropping in the bucket to be melted.

I retired before it had paid for itself, but I believe that after 12 years it's still going strong.

cheers

Bill

Seems to me that this is waste from a normal domestic household. Some have hobbies of cooking, or woodwork, or tapestry, dog and other animal waste or anything else. So the black bin takes it all, discrimination otherwise. Of course if you have 50kg then take it to the scrappy.

Our council produced a list of the only items to go in a black bin. Didn't include animal waste, sanitary products, even and old sticking plaster. These people are real dummies, how do they dispose of some paper towels covered in little Johny's sick?