The present invention generally relates to an apparatus and method for baling loose material. More specifically, the present invention relates to an apparatus that receives a steady flow of loose material, such as mulch, trash, or the like, compresses the loose material into a bale, and then wraps the bale with material to hold the bale together for transport and storage purposes.
A baler is a piece of farm machinery used to compress a cut and raked crop (such as hay, cotton, straw, or silage) into compact bales that are easy to handle, transport, and store. Several different types of balers are commonly used, each producing a different type of bale—rectangular or cylindrical, of various sizes, bound with twine, strapping, netting, or wire. Industrial balers are also used in material recycling facilities, primarily for baling metal, plastic, or paper for transport.
The most common type of baler in industrialized countries today is the large round baler. It produces cylinder-shaped “round” or “rolled” bales. The design has a “thatched roof” effect that withstands weather well. Grass is rolled up inside the baler using rubberized belts, fixed rollers, or a combination of the two. When the bale reaches a predetermined size, either netting or twine is wrapped around it to hold its shape. The back of the baler swings open, and the bale is discharged. The bales are complete at this stage, but they may also be wrapped in plastic sheeting by a bale wrapper, either to keep hay dry when stored outside or convert damp grass into silage.
Heretofore, baling was primarily used in connection with hay, cotton, straw, or other types of fibrous materials. It has been contemplated that baling other types of materials, such as dirt, mulch, and household garbage, for instance, would be beneficial, because those materials could be compressed into much smaller units that would occupy significantly smaller volumes than the loose materials that remain uncompressed. One problem, however, with baling dirt and mulch (for example), is the difficulty in compressing that material to form into a bale, and then ensuring that the bale would remain intact, rather than simply falling apart. Hay, cotton, and straw bales tend to remain intact after the baling operation has been completed, largely due to the length and fibrous nature of those materials. Dirt and mulch, which includes much smaller particulate, would simply crumble out of the sides of the bale during the baling process, and thus, balers for these types of materials have never been successfully manufactured and commercialized.
It would be particularly advantageous to provide a baler and method for baling other types of materials, and particularly non-fibrous materials that have, heretofore, been difficult to form into bales. The advantages of baling these and other materials include the ability to transport the bales, stack the bales for efficient storage, and compressing the materials into a volume that is much smaller than the volume of the uncompressed material.
Additionally, such a baler could be attached to other types of equipment, such as a mulching machine that creates mulch from trees, brush, and the like, as set forth in U.S. Patent Application Publication No. US 2011/0290921, which is hereby incorporated herein by reference. It is contemplated that a baler could be incorporated into a brush cutter/mulching machine, so that the mulcher would be capable of creating the mulch and feeding the mulch directly into the baler for baling.
Another useful technique would be to combine a baler with a trash or refuse collecting truck in order to compress and bale household or commercial trash. In such an arrangement, the trash workers could load trash directly into a feeder for the baler for compression and baling. When the bale reaches capacity and is released from the baler, the bale of trash could be stacked onto a flatbed of a truck, and additional bales could be stacked on top of one another in a compressed state, which means that such a truck could transport vastly larger quantities of trash than currently available methods allow. When the trash bales are delivered to a landfill, the bales could be neatly stacked, creating a much cleaner appearance, with the added benefit that the bales only occupy approximately 10% of the volume of uncompressed, loose trash and refuse. Thus, in this way, a landfill having a certain land area could contain as much as ten times the amount of trash dumped there in an uncompressed, loose manner as is typical of landfills in use today.