Local Bin Hire uses a Flip Screen to sieve heavy material from soil.

A booming Wagga Wagga company is helping the building industry sieve, crush and reuse waste on-site. By Liz Hoyland.

There are two basic ways to recycle building waste – haul it off-site for processing or build up a big stockpile before bringing in a crusher to sort the waste.

Flip Screen Australia managing director Sam Turnbull has a different idea, a crusher and bucket all in one that he calls a Flip Screen.

“Using our new crusher bucket, you can screen and then crush waste building products such as bricks and concrete as soon as they hit the ground,” he said.

“Our system means you can crush your material and make money on-site, say for fill, bedding, gabians and drainage ditches. All this would normally have just gone to landfill – and then you’d buy your gravel supplies from a landscape supplier.”

Crushing your own supplies on-site also cuts out the cartage time and costs in driving to and from the tip and the landscape suppliers.

The crusher bucket is highly efficient, screening four tonnes of waste in 8-12 seconds. One happy customer is Tony Bedford from Local Bin Hire, based in Victoria. He uses an EX130 Flip Screen to sieve heavy material from soil, and recover and reuse the material on-site.

“It saves us money,” Bedford said. “When we process 12 cubic metres of dirt, we save about 80 per cent of our costs.

“The best thing about using the Flip Screen is that it does high volume jobs, and sits on an excavator, which does not use a lot of my yard space compared to having huge screening machines on site.”

Turnbull said that expansion was key to Flip Screen’s agenda for 2010 following on from a stellar year when it grew by 29 per cent. Posting such figures saw Flip Screen named in Business Review Weekly magazine’s 2009 list of the 100 fastest growing start-up companies.

“We’ve doubled our sales to councils and our plans are to increase our production eight-fold in the next four years,” he said.

“We’re planning to increase our staff from 22 to an estimated 43 to 50. It means good employment opportunities for Wagga, and there’s a flow on to other industries.”

Turnbull said the Flip Screen was a multi-tasker – and had been adopted by industries such as construction and demolition, civil engineering, pipelines, mining, roads and railways, waste transfer stations, steel recycling and landscaping.

Flip Screen is registered for the Australian Government’s R&D Tax Concession, which encourages companies to invest in research by allowing them to claim back 125 per cent of their year’s R&D costs when they lodge their tax return. It also received a $470,000 Climate Ready grant that facilitated an 18-month development regime addressing the mechanical, hydraulic, metallurgy and prototype challenges.

Liz Hoyland is with AusIndustry. More at www.innovation.gov.au