Scrap metal processors are becoming increasingly clever
at wringing out the last dollar from their waste stream.
That includes recovering cleaner, greater weights of
high value nonferrous metals. Ben Davis, manager of
the magnetics division at Huron Valley Steel Corporation
is considered by many in the industry as the dean of
non-ferrous recovery. He had this to say about the
state of the business, “A lot of shredders today have
gotten away from autos and are going to smaller, low
speed shredders for white goods because the volume
of autos has gone down. The other major development
over the past few years was development of image technology
that senses and separates various non-ferrous by shape
and color.”
Huron, the largest processor of nonferrous in the world,
buys from shredders in Canada and all over the United
States except for some of the west coast states due
to transportation costs and because west coast shredders
export most of what they produce to Pacific rim countries,
mostly to China. Headquartered in Trenton, Michigan,
Huron operates recovery and recycling facilities in
Belleville, Michigan and Anniston, Alabama, and has
a joint-venture with HVF West in Tucson, Arizona.
In addition to processing nonferrous, Huron has
been designing and manufacturing eddy current separation
equipment for nearly 30 years, both for its own
use and for sale to nonferrous recovery operations.
It also provides consulting services to shredders,
municipal recyclers and landfills to maximize nonferrous
yields. “I do more consulting work than anything
else. My main job is to empty the shredder and not
send anything to a landfill … showing them how to
arrange their material to get maximum recovery,”
said Davis.
Bill Close, sales engineer for Wendt Corporation,
one of the world’s largest shredder manufacturers,
gave his opinion of the state of non-ferrous recovery.
“There have been some pretty significant improvements
in sensor based sorting equipment over the past
few years, including optical, x-ray, near infrared
and electromagnetic in terms of recovering products
from a waste stream. It’s a very competitive industry
and looking for improvements in processes to raise
revenues is mission critical.”
Coaxing non-ferrous out of a waste stream has always
been a challenge and has been traditionally as much
an art as a science. But science is playing a continually
larger role. Investing in new technologies and incremental
improvements in old ones can pay off. At least that
is the business plan of Adam Weitsman, president
of Upstate Shredding in Owego, New York.
In August, Upstate completed the first phase of
a $20 million dollar upgrade to its in-line auto
shredder and added a new auto shredder residue (ASR)
processing plant designed to maximize non-ferrous
recovery. Weitsman is confident that this investment
for downstream nonferrous recovery will pay off
quickly. “Our financial objective is to take all
the non-ferrous out of the waste stream and get
any marketable product we can. It should increase
our net revenue by approximately $20 million a year,
basically by recovering material that we now landfill
as well as having higher quality commodities to
sell.”
Upstate Shredding and its sister company Ben Weitsman & Son
has scrap yards in Owego, Binghamton and Ithaca,
just acquired land in Syracuse for a new facility
and is planning another yard in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
From this feeder system as well as from scrap dealers
in Canada, New England and the Mid-Atlantic states,
vehicle bodies and other scrap metals come to Upstate’s
Owego mega-shredder, currently a 6,000 h.p. M-120-104
unit by Riverside Engineering. Working seven days
per week, Upstate processes approximately 600,000
tons per year and is New York State’s largest scrap
metal processor. Approximately 90 percent of its
production goes overseas to China, India and Turkey.
“Adam’s going from a yard that did not have much
separation to one that has a great deal of separation
and recovering metals he was not able to do before.
It’s really nice,” said Rusty Manning, Riverside’s
new equipment sales manager. Early next year Riverside
will install its latest 10,000 h.p., 450 ton per
hour, M-122 mega shredder at Upstate – a more durable
machine with tougher wear-parts that will cost Upstate
less per ton to process. It will include Riverside’s
latest iteration of its Shredder Cruise Control,
a feed roll platform that automatically adjusts
the feed rate to maximize output while reducing
power consumption and the need for operator interaction.
By the end of this year, Riverside will add SGM
Magnetics Polishing Drum Magnets to Upstate’s downstream
shredder that will automatically produce a less
than 0.18 percent copper content ferrous frag and
facilitate the recovery of “meatballs,” electric
motors containing valuable copper armatures. The
move is designed to minimize manual picking, which
will reduce labor costs and increase productivity.
“This new technology was developed over the past
few years and we are incorporating it into our separation
system,” said Manning. After high-strength magnets
remove the ferrous shred, lower-strength magnets
attract the ferrous components of the motors such
as housings and steel shafts and remove the copper
bearing motors from the stream. “This hasn’t caught
on very well, but more and more people are beginning
to look at this technology when considering upgrades,”
Manning added.
According to Didier Haegelsteen, SGM Magnetics’
managing director, SGM Magnetics added this polishing
drum magnet technology an exclusive development
allowing the drum magnets to always feature the
same attraction force that is compulsory to perform
an accurate separation.
Adam Weitsman worked closely with SGM Magnetics
to design his downstream ASR recovery plant that
incorporates SGM’s latest ideas and separation technologies.
“I would say it ranks as one of the highest technology
plants in the world. I don’t know of anyone else
who has done this before. There are not many automobile
shredders that take residue and have all of the
eddy currents, sensors and also have the dry media
plant all under one roof,” said Haegelsteen.
Being under a roof is also new for Upstate. The
entire 200,000 sq. ft. facility is being roofed
over and enclosed. “We are doing this to conform
to New York State Department of Environmental Conservation
storm water regulations related to run off from
iron and ASR. We also built a storm sewer system
and an on-site, sand filter water treatment plant
to remove heavy metals, solvents, and other substances,”
said Weitsman.
The residue plant starts with a screening process
splitting the ASR material into four streams: -.63”;
from .63” to 1.25”; from 1.25” to 5”. Anything over
5” is sent back to the shredder. The two first fines
fractions are processed by dynamic ferrous separators
before passing on high frequency eddy current separators,
while the large fraction (>1.25” to 5”) is processed
by a drum magnet before passing on a standard eddy
current separator still spinning at 3,000 rpm. The
next separation step implemented by Upstate for
the two fractions over .63” is passing over inductive
sensor separators to recover the typical 1 to 2
percent metals missed by the eddy current separators,
made of predominately stainless steel, but also
including insulated copper wire, copper, aluminum,
magnesium, nickel, tin and zinc. This commodity,
predominately stainless steel, produced by the new
inductive sensor technology is classified as Zurik
by ISRI.
The eddy current processes, as well as the induction
sensor separation processes aim at recovering the
maximum quantity of metals in the ASR while the
next processes bring further added value to the
Zorba recovered by the eddy current separators.
Zorba is the ISRI spec for the mix of metals recovered
by eddy current separators processing ASR that is
predominately made of aluminum (about 70 percent).
Zorba, as such, can be sold to either China or to
domestic heavy media plants. The idea is to look
for extra value by separating the aluminum from
Zorba as well as separating the red and yellow metals
from the heavies. The benefit comes not only from
the extra value the market pays for separated single
metal commodities, but also offers disposal alternatives
to China and domestic heavy media plants by selling
the aluminum to aluminum smelters, and the red and
yellow metals to either brass or copper smelters.
At Upstate, Zorba produced by the eddy current working
on material from 1.25” to 5”, is sent to a dual-energy
x-ray separator that identifies particles by atomic
density and segregates the aluminum from the heavier
metals, typically zinc, copper and brass. “Thanks
to a different program on the x-ray separator, a
further possible added value can be brought to the
aluminum by discriminating the sheet from the cast
aluminum as we have already proven in Europe.” said
Haegelsteen.
X-ray detection technology is not dependent on particle
sizes, however, the smaller the material the lower
the productivity of the x-ray separators. This is
why at Upstate the x-ray is only dedicated to the
process of particles that are 1.25” to 5”.
For Zorba less than 1.25”, SGM supplied Upstate
with four Sandjet separators. The Sandjet consists
of a dry media plant that works on the same principle
as a wet media plant, but instead of using ferro
silicium to bring the liquid density up to that
of aluminum, Sandjet uses sand fluidized through
air jets to bring the density down to that of aluminum
and sinks the heavier zinc, copper, brass and stainless.
Fluidized sand works on a shifting mechanism and
the vibration carries the aluminum particles off
by inertia. SGM claims that separation is better
or equal to wet media separation at less operational
cost because it eliminates the sludge recycling
process. “The Sandjets take the copper out of the
aluminum. We had been selling copper at the aluminum
price because it was mixed in,” said Weitsman.
A new SGM Optic Color Sort System further segregates
yellow and red metals coming off the Sandjet. Upstate
installed six units, each employing multiple, ultra
high-speed, high resolution CCD cameras covering
a 48” belt width. Particle images are fed into a
computer that uses a proprietary algorithm that
discriminates between individual metal particles
and either accepts or rejects a particle based its
shape and color. After passing under the cameras,
accepted particles are automatically air ejected.
According to Haegelsteen, the fact that all these
technologies are dry and easy to operate (x-ray,
Sandjet and Color Sorter) makes it convenient for
shredder operators producing upwards of 5,000 tons
of Zorba per month.
Currently under contract, and coming soon to Upstate
is an $8 million dollar ASR insulated wire recovery
line. “I’ve been throwing away about 40,000 pounds
of insulated wire every day for 11 years. In the
big picture when you are buying two to three thousand
tons a day, 40,000 pounds is not a lot. It’s a heavy
investment to make it work on site, but with the
newer technology that senses the plastic from the
copper we are going to make it work,” said Weitsman.
“Our next goal is to recover glass and plastic as
soon as we can find the technology that does it
efficiently.”
