Ransome Attachments equips green waste effort

New Jersey-based Ransome Attachments has helped the Shelter Island Recycling Center on Long Island, New York, prepare incoming material for its horizontal grinding operation by supplying a Black Splitter Model SB hydraulic cone splitter.

The Shelter Island facility had just acquired a horizontal grinder and needed to downsize large pieces of vegetative waste before processing it to help ensure the longevity of its substantial investment. The Black Splitter Model SB not only filled that need, but also made the facility completely self-sufficient and saved taxpayer dollars, according to a Ransome Attachments news release.

Jay Card, superintendent of highways and commissioner of public works for the Town of Shelter Island, said using the Black Splitter in conjunction with its new Diamond Z TK4000 horizontal grinder is expected to save the town’s residents up to $3 million over 20 years.

“The DEP (Department of Environmental Protection) is going to give us 50 percent toward the grinder,” Card said, “so we're ultimately going to pay $350,000 for a $700,000 machine. “In about three-and-a-half years that machine will technically be paid for.”

The transfer station had been paying a subcontractor to haul a large horizontal grinder to process the material. Even that machine, however, was unable to handle stumps of up to seven feet in diameter, which resulted in costly trips transporting them to the subcontractor’s facility.

“The cost (for the subcontractor) was about $100,000 a year, and that's exactly what my payment is to own the machine (Diamond Z TK4000), so we translated the rental into a purchase,” says Card. “It is a smaller machine than [the subcontractor’s], but it's the perfect size for our operation.”

Card had never heard of a cone splitter until a colleague mentioned it. He simply knew that the recycling center needed a tool to downsize logs and stumps to extend the life of its new grinder. Card says he discovered New Jersey-based Ransome Attachments and its Black Splitter product line during an Internet search in late 2017.

“They were very receptive,” he recalled of the first outreach. “We scheduled a demo, and I wouldn't let them leave with it.”

Ransome mounted the unit on the recycling center’s Gehl 5640 skid steer loader. “We put it on the skid steer and it was unbelievable,” Card recalls. Counterparts he had invited from neighboring municipalities were also impressed. “We had a log that was probably three feet in diameter and 10 to 12 feet long,” Card says. “The Model SB split it almost instantly. I was shocked.”

By February 2018, the recycling center had taken delivery of the Model SB. “This tool is a perfect complement to the grinder,” says Card. “It takes a three-foot-wide log that the grinder would have a hard time trying to process and splits it into four or five pieces, and it just whistles right through the machine.”

Shelter Island is a resort area between the north and south forks of eastern Long Island. Once an agricultural community covered by grasslands, it is now a densely wooded region that produces a steady flow of material for the recycling center.

Approximately 3,000 residents call Shelter Island home year-round, but second-home owners and visitors can drive the population up to 20,000 during peak vacation season.

Roughly 75 percent of inbound material is vegetative, with the remainder being construction debris, recyclables and municipal solid waste. The recycling center sells all processed material in the form of mulch, compost, ground/shredded leaves, topsoil, recycled-content aggregates and a salt/sand mix. The constant ebb and flow of inbound and outbound products combined with the center’s small footprint means material must be turned around quickly.

The recycling center has the Model SB splitter mounted on a Caterpillar 430 backhoe with a quick attach plate. The While the Black Splitter can be used to move logs and load processing machinery, the recycling center uses it strictly as a splitting “workhorse.” The main objective is to reduce oversized logs to roughly 12 inches, so another machine can feed them to the grinder.

Card says Shelter Island shopped around before acquiring the Model SB, and he found a competing cone splitter to be oversized for his needs and twice the cost with no obvious difference in productivity

“We used to have material that you could not feed through the grinder and we process everything now,” he comments. “There's nothing you can bring us that we can’t process.”

Ransome Attachments is an affiliate of Lumberton, New Jersey-based Ransome Equipment Sales. It offers new and used demolition and recycling attachments including grapples, pulverizers and wood splitters. Ransome bills itself as the first and only distributor in North America of the Germany-made Black Splitter line.