The 2nd Quarter '04 issue of Horizons, a magazine for Anheuser-Busch stockholders, has an article about corporate responsibility including recycling. One of the accompanying photos shows a forklift carrying a large “brick” of smashed cans onto a Railbox boxcar.
Though the photo is staged (the boxcar floor is spotless) at least it shows a freight car in a non-rail publication…
why dose a spotless floor in a box car suprise you?
Its good to see a company ship by rail then by truck.
stay safe
joe
can we have a pic?
Hershey has a picture of a boxcar being unloaded in its plant tour.
Go to http://www.hersheys.com/tour/index.shtml then select select either tour. If you only want to see the boxcars, go straight to step two.
Because whenever I have looked into a boxcar I have seen some scrapes or dents or other minor pieces of “stuff” left behind. Besides, while crushed aluminum headed to the recycler may be “green”, it is still trash and tra***ends to be messy.
Maybe they picked one of those brand new high-door Railbox cars lettered “TBOX”
I don’t think aluminum heading for recycling will be as messy as trash going to a dump. The aluminum companies won’t want a bunch of junk in with the aluminum they get. What did the aluminum they were loading look like?
Here’s a link to the A-B website and the specific magazine. It is 3MB so will take a while if you are using dial-up. Photo is on Page 17 (magazine) / 19 (pdf file)
http://www.anheuser-busch.com/publications/2Q04Horizons.pdf
the crap you see in the cars is stuff left over befor cleanout… i have worked jobs where customers have rejected cars for “stuff” on the floors of the cars
csx engineer
I have a suspicion that the photo is staged, and I doubt that much if any crushed aluminum is moved by rail. Whenever I take my recycling stuff down to the local recycling company, I always see a few gondolas of scrap steel being loaded, but the crushed aluminum always goes by truck. When I asked the manager why, he stated that even crushed aluminum is light, too light to weigh out a gondola, while steel almost always weighs out the gondola. They are charged by the car, and they make their money by the weight of the scrap, so they apparently can’t get enough revenue by weight of aluminum in the gondola relative to the rate they are being charged by the railroad.
I know of a scrap aluminum place that ships crushed aluminum by rail, always in larger ex coal car gondolas, and often in pairs with a solid drawbar.
Bleed! I’ve hauled aluminum. It weighs out. I had a trucker, whoes name I don’t remeber, it began with a K and he ran out into Iowa from Chicago, come to us with aluminum loads. He couldn’t move 'em over the road, they were too heavy for a highway run. We ran 'em 275 miles on the rail, Chicago to Waterloo, Iowa, and made a buck doing it.
Now I don’t know why they guy you talked to is moving aluminum by truck instead of rail, there are several possible reasons. But I don’t think "aluminum is too light " is one of 'em. You can’t just talk to one guy. Talk is real cheap. He’s not going to tell you he doesn’t know or understand. He’ll make up an answer.
And AB’s not going to have or show a dirty anything. Yes, they cleaned the car before taking the picture. And they well may have retouched the picture. So what? That’s what you do when your image is quality. Beer is basically flavored water - marketing is everything. AB’s been successful marketing their product as “quality”, which it is. Don’t read in things that aren’t there.
I think A-B might be shipping it by rail, they own a railroad ya know.
I have hauled ALOT of aluminum coil “Eye to sky” in a covered wagon out of central kentucky to Anhauser Busch in Williamsburg VA thru the smokie mountains. 3 coils on a aluminum framed covered wagon pushes the whole rig close to just about 40 ton. (The load is usually high centered and heavier than the rig itself.)
Aluminum is NOT light. They feed the coil thru stamping machines that literally “Consume” the coil each stamp (Several stamps per second under computer control) creates about 180 cans and lids etc… There is a small amount of leftovers. Those get conveyor belted directly to a large “Dumpster” (Roll on and roll off) and when it fills I guess it goes somewhere having been sold for a small income.
I think cubes of scrap metal is full of sharp edges and strong peices of angles… they will dent and stratch a boxcar’s interior. Heh… they might even just stack a bunch into a beat up van trailer like chicks behind a mother duck and ship it somewhere where it is useful (either down the production line or sold)
I have also hauled out of aluminum mills in western maryland that creates monster aluminum bars that are like 6 feet across, 3-4 feet high and about 30 feet long. Strap it down and ship THAT to a place in the dutch country where it gets processed into coils or bullets (Solid metal tubing used in extrusions) or what have ya.
There is quite a bit of waste… alot of it is recycled. I think a average food distribuion center will generate several truck loads of baled cardboard that gets sent to the far east or some such place for a profit.
It is my personal opinion that factories deal with waste in a way that is LEAST expensive. They dont care if they landfill it, ship it by boxcar/gondola or by dump truck etc… as long as it does not cost very much money and hopefully make a small profit after the hauling away the scrap is paid for.
Good to see that Messrs Anheuser are doing something socially responsible. I just wi***hey’s stop spending all the money they spend on lawyers and hassling the Czech brewery which brews Budweiser-Budvar and instead focus on brewing some decent beer. (They could start by using hops instead of rice!).
Quite a bit of aluminium moves by rail in Britain - the plants are very geographically dispersed (South Wales, NE England and Fort William on the West Highland line in Scotland) which no doubt helps to swing the balance in favour of rail.
I will agree that Budweiser is garbage beer, but they do use hops in the brewing process. I would take a Czech pilsner over that AB carp anyday.
How dense scrap aluminum is depends a lot on the crusher. With a decent crusher bales of aluminum should be at least as dense as baled cardboard which is regularly shipped in 50’ boxcars.
That may be. I remember seeing a crushed can or two falling off the bales as they loaded them onto a flatbed. Perhaps with a better crusher they could weigh them up enough to ship by gondola (they don’t have a railside ramp or dock, just a spur into the yard with a crane for loading). Or it could be the railroads won’t offer a decent rate to the destination (the guy said they ship em “down south”). I think the scrap steel is sent to Portland OR, so it’s a fairly short haul by rail, but better car cycling time.
Many years ago I watched a most interesting aluminum recycling operation at a local distributor. They shredded the cans into roughly 1/2 inch chips, then magnetically separated the steel out and loaded the aluminum pnuematically into a high cube box car with the doors boarded up (like loading grain into a box car).
dd
Bud is the second worst beer after Fosters.