Why you should recycle your old forklift
Not sure if you should retire your forklift? You should retire it when it’s coming to the end of its economic life. Cost efficiency and environmentally friendliness are important factors.
Rather than trash your old forklift to the warehouse equipment graveyard, do what you can to salvage the working life that is left. In fact, you can give it a brand new life if you send it to a forklift-recycling center where it can undergo refurbishment. Then, like an old car that’s been brought to life, someone else can take advantage of the like-new condition and enjoy its use.
Not sure if you should retire your forklift? You should retire it when it’s coming to the end of its economic life, which means the cost to run the machine is more than the production value it offers your warehouse. That’s when it’s time to make a decision.
Cost Efficiency
Cost efficiency through recycling is one method of keeping your costs low, especially if you have a budget that doesn’t allow for surprise repairs. Sometimes it’s just more cost effective to send your old forklift off to be recycled and then purchase another recycled forklift rather than have to deal with one that breaks down all the time and can’t be relied on.
Environmentally Friendliness
When recycling your forklift, it’s important to be responsible. With an eye on the environment, you can ensure you’re not adding to the landfills of abandoned machinery. Not only is this equipment big and bulky, it can leak chemicals, battery acid or oil if just thrown away and not recycled. The heavy metals on the machinery can also leach into the ground it’s on, causing an additional hazard to groundwater. By reusing parts that can be integrated to make a like-new machine, you’re cutting down on wasted parts that must be discarded. The end result is a machine that works just like a new one, but you will know you’ve done a service to the environment by keeping at least parts of it in circulation.
You can think of a forklift as a sum of its parts, with many of those parts needing revamping every once in awhile. However, you don’t always have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. You can salvage the machine itself, but you may need to recycle old parts and install new or refurbished ones. A good example of this is the tires, which tend to wear down more quickly than other components of a forklift. Whether you have solid, pneumatic or other types of tires, you can recycle those and get new ones to fit your exact model of forklift, thereby breathing new life into something that may have been sent to the trash heap had you not been so fiscally and environmentally conscious. You can rest easy knowing those tires will enjoy new life as compost holders, walls, playground flooring and much more.
