Published by Farmers Guide, September 2007.

Recycling farm rubble is nothing new

You would think from the recent frenzy of advertising and publicity offering mobile concrete crushers for sale and hire that this was a new phenomenon, brought about by the recent introduction of the Agricultural Waste Regulations that treat demolition rubble as a waste material to be disposed of responsibly.

In fact, farmers have been exploiting the value of redundant buildings and concrete pads for years, as Simon Oliver of Crusher Trucks Ltd is happy to confirm.

Mr Oliver has been offering concrete and rubble crushing services throughout Norfolk and Suffolk - and occasionally a little further afield - for almost 10 years and estimates that about half his work comes from farmers, with local builders and the construction industry making up the remainder of his customer base.

The founding principle of Mr Oliver's business is: why pay to have waste concrete hauled away and buy in aggregates when you can have it economically crushed on-site to make your own.

This is as true today as it ever was - indeed the Agricultural Waste Regulations mean that there is a new emphasis on reusing demolition rubble rather than burying it - and Mr Oliver has seen growing competition from the hire-shop sector which now commonly offers compact concrete crushers by the hour, day or week.

But comparing the Crusher Trucks service to a hired compact crusher is like comparing chalk and cheese. What you get when you call Simon Oliver is a self-contained, tracked mobile crusher and operator that can handle just about any job with no effort required by the customer - other than pointing to the material to be crushed.

Mr Oliver's first two crushers were built on lorry chassis and certainly performed the job they were designed for, but his latest machine - introduced two-and-a-half years ago and fully patented - adopted a new approach. Built using two dismantled Hitachi 360-degree diggers, the current machine has an integral crusher that will reduce slabs of concrete 30 inches wide and 18 inches thick to fist-size chunks at a rate of up to 200t/day. It has a grabber arm to load the crusher and a separate hydraulic breaker for dealing with any pieces of concrete too big for the jaws.

The crushed concrete is deposited by a hydraulically operated elevator that can leave the material in neat heaps, or load it directly into trailers.

Everything is controlled from a cab situated on a turntable above the crusher where the two arms are mounted, and the whole process is powered by an on-board diesel engine and a host of hydraulic pumps, motors and rams.

Other features include dust suppression equipment to meet strict environmental standards, a magnet to remove any steel re-inforcing material that may be in the concrete and a weighing system in the discharge belt which is used as the basis for charging for the service.

For transport, a clever rocking system under the crusher's tracks allows the machine to attach a set of rear transport wheels and then lets a tractor unit couple-up to the front to produce a road-legal, articulated vehicle.

A fully licensed crusher under the Environmental Protection Act 1990, Mr Oliver takes care of all the regulatory aspects of the job.

Although there is no minimum quantity that Mr Oliver will tackle, there is a minimum callout charge that covers the first 20t of crushed material, with any additional material charged by the tonne.

"The beauty of this set-up is that I can handle small jobs under the minimum callout charge, but it's just at home on jobs of up to 500t," Mr Oliver told Farmers Guide. "The crusher can get to just about any site and will handler floor slabs, walls, bricks and even tarmac with relative ease.

"There has always been a demand for this service because farmers don't like to throw anything away, but now there's the added incentive of having to recycle and re-use materials."

Simon Oliver.