City achieves major cost savings by replacing 34-year-old waste handling cranes

The City of Quebec, Canada built their waste-to-energy plant in 1974 to incinerate municipal garbage and generate income by selling steam to a nearby paper plant. Decades later, the plant's two aging cranes were costing the city more than US $400,000 a year to maintain. Designed before modern technologies such as load sway prevention were available, the cranes were difficult to operate and hard to keep running. Critical components such as wire ropes were wearing out every two weeks, structural failure was rampant and downtime was escalating. And when the cranes were down for repair, the facility was unable to receive, mix or burn waste.

Fortunately, there was a solution. The city wanted state-of-the-art automated cranes that were integrated with their entire facility–technology with more to offer in terms of information and feedback, plus strategies to reduce maintenance and prolong the life of the facility and its equipment. 

We specified two new fully-automated CMAA Class “F” AC-powered cranes with variable frequency drives for energy efficiency and an easier-to-operate hydraulic grab. The cranes are identical, 10-ton capacity with 2.5-ton auxiliary hoists, operating on a 55-meter runway. Each crane is equipped with a hydraulic grab that picks up more than twice the amount of garbage as the previous cable-operated mechanical grabs and also has the ability to compress the garbage to hold more.

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