A constant battle waged in fleets today is the clash between the seemingly competing initiatives of profitability and sustainability. It appears that in this situation, one has to be at the expense of the other.
Enter “repurposing.” This is a strategy that makes as much sense environmentally as it does economically. The concept of repurposing, basically, involves taking an obsolete material or product to its primary industry and finding a second life for it in an unrelated industry.
A repurpose for a fleet maintenance operation might be repurposing a roll or two of old, scrap rubber conveyor belting from the mining industry and using it for protective shop flooring. This can reduce the wear and tear on a shop’s concrete floors every time a bulldozer or cleated-wheel landfill compactor is driven in.
If you’re in the northern U.S., these same rolls of old conveyor belting can be cut to length and installed as a snowplow blade deflector. The used conveyor belting will give equal performance as a purpose-built new deflector but at half the cost.
Ideal Materials
Materials ideal for repurposing are ones that are generic, versatile and adaptable. As in the example of old conveyor belt, it can be repurposed in all kinds of creative ways in all kinds of industries. Cattle ranchers build wind breaks out of them, demolition companies use them as blast mats, etc.
If you’re constructing a new maintenance facility, the ultimate concrete floor repurpose protection comes at the time of construction. Instead of just pouring a straight concrete floor, enterprising fleet shop designers actually space used railroad rails about 18” to 24” on center prior to pouring the concrete. They then pour concrete up to 1/8” to 1/4" on the tops of the rail.
Once dried, the floor is pretty much a normal floor until a bulldozer or other tracked machine is driven onto it. The tracks of the bulldozer ride on the slightly elevated steel rails instead of the concrete.
One warehouse manager painted old railroad rail yellow and bolted them out 24” from his warehouse walls to act as a “bumper” to keep forklifts and vehicles from crashing into the warehouse walls.
Wear Parts
At repurposedMATERIALS, we pioneered our repurposing mission/concept on used materials like used conveyor belting from mines. But as our organization has matured, we are discovering more and more opportunities to find unrelated second industries that can repurpose materials coming out of fleet maintenance, particularly the different wear parts that are systematically replaced on different types of fleet equipment.
Consider this repurpose that came from a municipal fleet maintenance byproduct. City fleets routinely replace used street sweeper brushes, or tube brooms, as they’re called in the industry. This particular city fleet repurposed its tube brooms as backscratchers for livestock at horse farms, dairies and zoos all across America.
With fleet wear parts and the like, landfilling is often the hassle-free way to get rid of the items but that is obviously at odds with organizational initiatives, such as landfill diversion goals or efforts to reach Zero Waste.
Fleet maintenance crews that service fire trucks are often left wondering what to do with all the old, decommissioned fire hoses that had to be replaced. Many heavy equipment operators will take this old fire hose and run their hydraulic lines inside of it. This serves as an inexpensive sleeve to prevent premature wear and damage to hydraulic lines.
Innovative ways to repurpose materials are limitless. Whether you’re trying to stretch an ever-shrinking operations budget, or are trying to keep material out of the landfill, keep repurposing in mind as strategy.
Damon Carson is the founder and president of repurposedMATERIALS (www.repurposedmaterialsinc.com), an organization that finds new uses for items at the end of their lives. It currently has yards in Denver, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas and Philadelphia.
