recovery issue 2
DESCRIPTION
From Eriez - Helping move the grade recovery curve.TRANSCRIPT
MakeHow to
From Eriez—Helping Move The Grade-Recovery Curve
ReCovERy3rd quarter 2011
Settling InThe per-ton difference that steel mills will
pay for shredded scrap compared with heavy melt changes, but recently has found
a common range.
the Finer thingsThe new FinesSort® Jr. from Eriez helps
Clayton County Recycling secure a higher recovery rate on small fines.
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
Ballistic SeparatorProduces Premium #1 Low-Copper Shred
... increasing the value of your ferrous Eriez’ new Shred1TM Ballistic Separator efficiently processes “consumer scrap” into a Premium #1 Low-Copper Shred ferrous product. Shred1 uses “ballistics” to automatically separate high-grade iron rich ferrous, from mixed metals and waste. Superior separation to x-ray sorting.
Increases ferrous recovery from 1 to 2%!
PERMANENT Rare EarthXtreme® Drum MAGNET
Ballistic Separator• Produces a Premium #1 Low-Copper Shred • #1 Shred contains less than 0.17% Copper• Eliminates costly air systems• Reduces picking labor • No x-ray scanning neededCall 888.300.3743 or visitFerrousRecovery.Eriez.com
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See how SHRED1™
is changing the way
Ferrous isprocessed!
PREMIUMFraction is
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Ferrous and Nonferrous Recovery Solutions
See us at ISRI 2012
Shred1Ad_FullPg_RecMag911_Layout 1 8/12/11 1:57 PM Page 1
RecoveRy
table of contents
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letter from the ceo4Eriez CEO Tim Shuttleworth comments on the renewed emphasis the company has placed on its service to the recycling industry.
technologist Q&A6A Rare TalentIn a wide-ranging career as a researcher at Eriez, Mike Ross has studied rare earth metals and many other aspects of magnetic.
market analysis12Settling InThe per-ton difference that steel mills will pay for shredded scrap compared with heavy melt changes, but recently has found a common range.
market analysis16Distant DispatchesReports on scrap metal supply and de-mand have been delivered at recycling conventions held throughout the world in the first half of 2011.
operational perspective19The Finer ThingsThe new FinesSort Jr. from Eriez helps Clayton County Recycling secure a higher recovery rate on small fines.
products22Learn about the latest technologies avail-able from Eriez.
cover story8How to Make TwitchThe right shredder downstream system can help scrap recyclers create an aluminum twitch product that makes the grade.
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Recovery is produced by Eriez
2200 Asbury Road
Erie, PA 16506
814.835.6000
800.345.4946
www.eriez.com
RecoveRy
from the ceoTim ShuttleworthPresident and [email protected]
RecoveryQ3
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Eriez has been focused on solving separation challenges and process flow issues for our cus-tomers for nearly 70 years. Our customer base,
which extends to every continent in the world, also covers a wide range of industries, from mining and food processing to aerospace manufacturing and oil production. Lately the Eriez team has been very focused on one of our most important sectors, the recycling industry.
This issue of Recovery, our magazine dedicated to the recycling industry, contains some important stories. There is a feature that explores the value of No. 2 shred and how it can add substantially to a shredder operator’s bottom line. You’ll also find a technical review covering how shredder operators can produce twitch. Beyond that are reviews of industry events we’ve recently attended along with an enlightening case study of how one operator benefit from an Eriez FinesSort®.
There is a lot of work being done at Eriez to extend our value to the recycling in-dustry. We’ve recently begun work at our new Wager Road facility in Erie, PA. This manufacturing plant greatly increases our capacity. Our Five-Star Service® Center also is moving to this facility, tremendously increasing our service capabilities.
In order to be more responsive to our recycling industry customers, we also have reorganized, making recycling a stand-alone business unit within our heavy industries group. With that, Darrell Milton has been promoted to market manager for our recy-cling business. These are important changes as they will allow our entire organization to be more responsive in meeting product and service needs.
Like our customers, Eriez also is deeply committed to workplace safety. I’m, there-fore, very proud to announce that Eriez recently passed a milestone of 1,000 days with zero work-time loss injuries. As you all know it takes the total commitment of an orga-nization to make that happen. The Eriez team has done tremendous work to ensure a safe working environment for all of our team members.
As an organization, Eriez will continue to evolve to provide leading edge engineer-ing and products to assist our customers in solving their most complex separation chal-lenges. In fact, in response to the rare earth material limitations the world has heard so much about, we’ve developed an alternative technology for our P-Rex® permanent drum magnet. It offers the same great quality and recovery, and no exposure to interna-tional trade disputes!
If you’d like to learn more about any of the information in this issue, or how Eriez might be of service to your business, please give me, or any of our associates, a call.
Tim Shuttleworth
”Not only do these new drums improve our ferrous recovery, they maintain that rate throughout the day. Even late in the shift, when our previous electro magnets would get hot and weaken, we don’t see any missed ferrous on the scavenger belts. P-Rex does a great job of pulling out all the solids and meatballs keeping them in one place where our hand pickers can easily remove them.”
Joe Plumadore – Liberty Iron
“Once the P-Rex™ drum magnets were installed, we could see the improvement in ferrous recovery right away. We’re delivering a high-grade ferrous product.“Marc Olgin – Liberty Iron - Phoenix, AZ
40%StrongerTWICE the Reach!*
*comparison of the Force Index ratings of standard electromagnetic drumsversus P-Rex during normal operating conditions.
P-Rex Magnet
SUPERIORFerrous RecoverySUPERIORFerrous Recovery
Call 888-300-3743 or visit Eriez.com
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PERMANENT Rare EarthXtreme™ Drum MAGNET
EriezLibertyTestimonialAd_RT2_11_Layout 6 1/18/11 3:24 PM Page 1
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technologist Q&A
A RareTalentIn a wide-ranging career as a researcher at Eriez, Mike Ross has studied rare earth metals and many other aspects of magnetics.
“The first installation was hands-down a success; it was that obvious immediately after installation. It works as designed and advertised.”
Mike Ross describes himself as a “lifer” at Eriez, but even after nearly 40 years with the company, he enjoys the fact that “there is no telling what my next e-mail will bring in.”
In an interview with Recovery, Mike discusses the broad spectrum of research he has engaged in, including research that helped make the P-Rex drum magnet the outstanding performer that it is.
company. I used ANSYS for its first struc-tural application.
Since I had so much experience with these new machines, I was asked to transfer to the engineering department and guide the transition of the company from drafting boards to computer-aided design (CAD). This work included ad-vancing the design of several different magnetic separation products. During the evenings I was learning magnetic equipment design at the same time. I did this for about 15 years.
For the past five years or so I have been back in R&D doing magnetic fi-
nite element analysis (FEA)-based design work for the entire Eriez organization. I receive e-mail requests on a daily basis from all around the world asking for as-sistance on projects involving some sort of magnetic device. I’m pretty busy. But in the evenings now I am growing and feeding a beef cattle herd.
Q. For how long have you been studying rare earth magnetic materials and what have been some of the goals of your re-search?MR: Rare earth magnetic materials have been commonly available since the 1980s. During that time we began to apply them to separation equipment, re-placing heavy electromagnetic devices. What really changed the use of these was the developing dominance and re-duction in cost by the Chinese. The very low costs allowed magnetic circuits to be developed that would never have been considered earlier.
The goals of our research have always been and should continue to be satisfy-ing a recognized need for a customer.
Recent cost increases in China have changed the field once again. We have something new soon to be introduced, greatly reducing the rare earth magnet costs while maintaining all of the ben-efits—plus introducing a few new ones.
Q. What did Eriez ask you to do for them as they set out to design the product that would become the P-Rex?MR: One cold winter day I received an e-mail from Tim Shuttleworth, our
Q. When did you start to work for Eriez and what was your previous work and academic experience?Mike Ross (MR): I am a lifer here. My father started working here shortly after I was born. My earliest recollection of Eriez is from when I was about five years old. I worked in manufacturing and R&D during my four years of undergraduate study at Penn State, where I studied civil engineering. I was fortunate to be offered a position as a process engineer in R&D at Eriez after completing my degree. I did this for about 13years, running tests and doing process development work in the lab and field. The variety was incred-ible—from minerals to foods and every-thing in between. I also completed an MBA in international marketing at Gan-non University during this time.
Personal computers were just appear-ing in the market at that time. I spent many evenings learning these machines and writing software that others then used to design and analyze magnetic circuits. At this time we introduced finite element analysis software (ANSYS) to the
Q u o T A b l E
Recovery Q3
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company president, asking if I thought a permanent magnet scrap drum sepa-rator could be developed to replace the electromagnetic variety. Within a couple of days I thought it could be done. After some 50 or 60 FEA iterations, we had a product. I get a great deal of satisfaction in seeing design work turn into products. Not enough research and development work really goes that far.
This quickly became something dif-ferent. I was free to determine the initial performance specifications and, fortu-nately, they were at a high enough stan-dard to satisfy later requests. I knew what we needed, since I had been involved with the electromagnetic design for about 15 years. My goal was to design a separator that could exceed the perfor-mance of the electromagnet and at the same time solve its problems. We suc-ceeded completely and with a product that at that time could be cost competi-tive with the electromagnetic drums.
Q. What materials or design aspects make the P-Rex unique?
MR: I am sure everyone who is faced with competing with P-Rex would like very much to know the design aspects that make P-Rex unique! I’d prefer to keep it that way. We are publishing a paper showing the results of the design
without detailing how it is done. Since physics applies equally to all, anyone else can figure it out just as well as I did.
Q. What are some of the discoveries made during the P-Rex process that can help Eriez as it designs other new products?MR: I think any great product is a culmi-nation of a lot of little discoveries and a bunch of great people. It also takes one person such as Tim Shuttleworth with the drive to make a product successful. Eriez has made investments in plasma and laser-cutting technology, robotic welding, advanced metal fabrication and computer-assisted modeling and design. We used all of these things to hatch P-Rex. Even more important, our manu-facturing people are very capable crafts-men. Without their talent P-Rex could never have been safely built.
Q. To what extent were you involved with P-Rex field testing, and what was learned during that process?MR: For more than two years, I have traveled all over the country and Canada inspecting both ours and our com-petitors’ drums. I have watched them operate, measured the magnet fields and other data and listened to the operators’ complaints,
needs and wishes.
P-Rex gives consistent performance, higher recovery and a cleaner product.
The first installation was hands-down a success; it was that obvious immediate-ly after installation. It works as designed and advertised. The most obvious indi-cation was that scavenger magnets over the nonferrous stream recovered nothing after the P-Rex installation. There is no ferrous metal being missed by P-Rex.
Q: How has the recent volatility in rare earth minerals pricing affected P-Rex?MR: P-Rex has opened users’ eyes to the realization that a stronger and consistent-strength drum provides better recovery than the traditional electro axial drums. Plato said, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Now we have been forced to invent a stronger drum that did not require rare earths or did not require as much rare earth. The same tools at my disposal to design the P-Rex, computer finite element analysis, robotics, numer-ic-controlled machines and laser-guided coil winding, are all still within our tech-nology base at Eriez. In fact, Eriez CEO Tim Shuttleworth has never refused to buy analytical tools I have requested. Plus, we built upon those many little dis-coveries we unearthed when we created P-Rex. The result is two new designs; one stronger than P-Rex yet requiring a small fraction of the rare earth materials and costing less than P-Rex and another design in strength between traditional
electro-axial drums and the much stronger P-Rex.
Both of these pre-serve the important benefits of consis-tent strength and no dropping of material as it moves from the pick-up zone to the top of the drum. This will be un-veiled at the
next ISRI Annu-al Convention.
Mike Ross
Recovery
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cover story
Q3
The right shredder downstream system can help scrap recyclers create an aluminum twitch product that makes the grade.
MakeHow to
Recovery Q3
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cover story
The market for aluminum scrap experiences its ups and downs in both pricing and demand, as does
any scrap market. For the most part, how-ever, a recycler who can ship desirable
grades of aluminum scrap can find buyers for the material.
Metals shredder operators have increasingly found receptive buy-ers for the shredded aluminum
scrap grade “twitch.” Twitch is the Institute of Scrap Recycling Indus-tries Inc. (ISRI) specification name
for the shredded aluminum grade described this way: “Floated frag-mentize aluminum scrap - derived from media separation device. Less
than 1 percent free zinc, 1 percent free magnesium, 1 percent iron, 2 percent non-metallics, 1 percent rubber and plas-tic.”
The creation of twitch from the diverse feedstock acquired by auto shredder op-erators is no easy task and requires the properly configured array of equipment.
Product and project managers work together at Eriez to advise shredder opera-tors who want to produce twitch on how they can best go about the task.
EDDY’S ON THE TEAMDan Norrgran, a researcher at Eriez, says optimal twitch production starts by first deploying drum magnets that capture all the ferrous scrap.
The non-magnetic fraction then ide-ally is directed to a trommel screen, says Norrgran. The trommel screen most often creates one-inch plus and one-inch minus streams, he notes. “Common size mate-rial always yields better separation,” adds Norrgran’s colleague Mike Shattuck.
Each fraction is then directed to eddy current separator units. The units “sepa-rate the conductors from the non-con-ductors,” says Norrgran. “The eddy cur-rent is great for getting out copper, brass and aluminum and some zinc,” he adds, creating a mixed nonferrous metal stream that goes to one conveyor and a mixed (largely) nonmetallic stream that heads off down a different conveyor belt.
(As an aside, Norrgran mentions that stainless steel fragments may still be part of the nonmetallic stream at this point, requiring the later attention of a product such as the Eriez ProSort machine to res-cue it for later retrieval.)
Eriez describes its eddy current sepa-
MAGNETIC FERROUS
MAGNETIC SCRAP DRUMS1
NON-MAGNETICNONFERROUS
SHREDDER
FINESSORT® SEPARATOR(EDDY CURRENT SEPARATOR)
2
DENSITYSORT™ AIR TABLE3
ZORBA
ZEBRA TWITCH
NON-MAGNETICNON-CONDUCTIVE
EDDY CURRENT SEPARATOR2
©Eriez Manufacturing Co 2011
TROMMELSCREEN+1” Material
- 1” Material
The Eriez DensitySortTM Air Table (above) is part of a multi-step process to turn a portion of metals shredder feedstock into an aluminum Twitch scrap product. The diagram below portrays the numerous other shredding and downstream sorting steps involved in the process.
RecoveryQ3
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cover story
rators as consisting of “an external drum, an internal permanent magnetic rotor, a drive and belt conveyor.”
As an eddy current separator operates, “Through the induction of eddy currents and the resulting repelling forces, the alternating magnetic field selectively re-pels the nonferrous metals and physically separates them from other materials with minimum product loss.”
The company’s Xtreme Eddy model uses “huge curved blocks of rare earth magnets,” in this case for “select high-tonnage applications, where maximum recovery is required.”
Shattuck says the Eriez Xtreme® eddy current’s advantages include reaching deeper into the field and having a long throw distance.
For one-inch minus material, Eriez recommends its FinesSort Separator, an eddy current designed specifically to cap-ture smaller metallic pieces.
“Scrap yard op-erators often only focus on reclaim-ing larger sized nonferrous metals, ignoring smaller material referred to as ‘fines,’ which represents rough-ly 15 percent of the original total flow,” says Shat-tuck, who is Eriez’ Product Man-ager – Recycling. “When you con-sider that within the fines, general-ly less than 5 per-cent is recyclable metal, the stream may seem insignificant, but reclaiming these valuable metals can be worth hundreds of thousands of dol-
lars annually,” he adds.
The high-fre-quency FinesSort Separator can re-cover greater than 90 percent of the nonferrous pieces presented to it, ac-cording to Eriez.
When feed-ing eddy currents, Norrgran says its important to keep the material flow even and in one layer. “You’re go-ing to get interfer-ence from other pieces of material
if they are lying on top of each other, so ideally, a mono-layer is the best way to feed these.”
The proper equipment can separate Zorba (top) from aluminum Twitch (bottom). [Photos courtesy of Paragon Metals International, www.ParagonMetals.biz.]
RRT Design & Construction
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Recovery Q3
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cover story
SEEKING LIGHTWEIGHTSTo produce twitch, Eriez advises that the mixed nonferrous metal stream that leaves an eddy current separator should then go to its DensitySort Air Table unit.
“It’s sort of like an air hockey table,” Norrgran says of the DensitySort. “It shakes and has air blowing through it. Aluminum is light and is moved by the air nozzles,” he continues, “so the Den-sitySort is able to make that separation to get a clean aluminum product, which be-comes your twitch.”
The DensitySort is designed to handle either ¼-inch-by-1-inch or 1-inch-by-2-inch fractions without a change to the set-up of the machine.
Eriez says the smaller fraction of non-ferrous fines (also known by the ISRI spec-ification name “zorba”) typically contains from 8 to 12 percent heavy metals.
The DensitySort uses its combination of air, vibration and slope to separate without requiring a media base such as sand, water or filtration to achieve the separation.
As product is fed at the high point of the table’s slope, its own specific mass di-rects the product to the low or high side of the table, creating the upgraded alumi-num scrap product (twitch) as well as a heavy product containing nearly 80 per-cent heavy metals by weight.
As a fluidized bed of material is main-tained, the heavy products sink to the bottom of the burden and travels to a discharge point. The light fraction (alumi-num) remains on top of the burden and travels to a different low-side table dis-charge point. Any product that does not get separated on the first pass re-circulates until it reaches the appropriate discharge, says Eriez.
The end result for automobile shred-der operators is the production of an alu-minum twitch product that meets the ISRI specification and/or the specifications de-sired by the end consumer or broker seek-ing to buy the twitch grade.
THE MATcH GAMEAmong the issues that recyclers and their equipment suppliers must address jointly is matching up the right size of equipment to a recycler’s anticipated volume of material.
Dan Norrgran of Eriez says a formula that is often applied matches the tons per hour with the width of the eddy current belt (or other piece of equipment’s surface area).
“For fine material, if we have a 60-inch-wide belt, we can run a certain number of tons per hour of feed,” he comments.
The same logic applies to the DensitySort AirTable made by Eriez, says Norrgran, with a measure of tons per square foot per table area being a key metric.
Quality and Service Since 1908PULVERIZER COMPANY
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e-mail: [email protected]
American Pulverizer Co., of St. Louis, Missouri offers a center-feed, high-speed hammermill for processing Auto Shredder Residue (ASR) designed to yield a higher metal recovery percentage.
The shredded product that is created reduces material to a more manageable state that can be reprocessed through metal separators to yield higher recovery rates from non-ferrous metals.
The mills are designed for high production with minimal maintenance. Design is based on years of experience with ASR and other E-Scrap products.
Complete Ferrous and
Non-Ferrous Metal Separation
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ASR Mill
Single Source for Automobile and Scrap Processing Systems
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market analysis
Scrap recyclers buy shredding plants for many reasons, includ-
ing gaining access to forms of obsolete scrap that may other-wise go to competitors.
Installing a shredder brings with it a considerable upfront investment fol-lowed by a parade of operating costs (such as power, maintenance and wear parts).
A potential selling point is the per-ton price that can be fetched for shredded ferrous scrap vs. the grades produced by shears and balers.
The number of variables that can dif-fer from plant to plant and from one re-gional market to another make it difficult to conclude whether the spread between shredded grades and cut grades helps make a shredder installation worthwhile. Comparing monthly national averages paid by domestic steel mills for No. 2 shredded scrap and No. 1 heavy melting steel (HMS) only provides a blurry snap-shot, not a crystal clear photo.
But looking at data from the previ-ous several years at least points to some trends or clues as to when and how the spread between these two grades moves.
Settling In
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The per-ton difference that steel mills will pay for shredded scrap compared with heavy melt changes, but recently has
found a common range.
A NATIONAL YARDSTICKData collected by Management Science Associates Inc. (MSA), Pittsburgh, for its Raw Material Data Aggregation Ser-vice (RMDAS) has provided a monthly national average for domestic steel mill scrap buying since 2006.
RMDAS (http://rmdas.msa.com) col-lects mill scrap purchase transactions by geographic region and by grade and averages them over 30 days. Among the most common ferrous scrap grades pur-chased and tracked are: Prompt industrial grades (No. 1 bun-
dles, No. 1. busheling and No. 1 fac-tory bundles);
No. 1 HMS; and No. 2 shredded scrap, defined as
containing 0.17 percent or greater copper content.Looking at the RMDAS data for prices
paid for No. 1 HMS and No. 2 shredded scrap from January 2008 to May of 2011 shows that the value of the two grades demonstrates some consistencies (No. 2 shredded always fetches more per ton on average) but also a number of vari-ables over time as well.
DIGGING INTO THE DATAPerhaps the first set of numbers to look at consists of the averages over the course of this three-and-a-half-year span.
The market for ferrous scrap has zoomed from bull to bear and back to bull from January 2008 to May 2011.
The 41-month-span provides ample opportunities to observe the market from peak demand periods on the one side (the first seven months of 2008, for instance) to some months where steel
provided by
mills in the United States were operating at below 40 percent of capacity (January 2009).
The average price paid by mills for No. 2 shredded scrap during this 41-month roller coast ride has been $352 per ton, while the average per-ton price for No. 1 HMS has been $315. This yields an average monthly spread of $37 per ton between the two grades.
While $37 is the average spread, the market has been volatile to an extent that this average was created despite several “outlier” months where the spread was either far wider or narrowed somewhat.
At the height of the bull market for fer-rous scrap, in July of 2008, the steel mills in the United States reporting to MSA paid $80-per-ton more for No. 2 shred-ded compared to No. 1 HMS—the wid-est spread recorded during the 41-month span. (The only other two months when the spread exceeded $70 per ton were the two months directly following July 2008.)
The narrowest spread occurred not during the ferrous scrap market’s abso-lute lowest month in the past four years (which, according to RMDAS data, would have been in April 2009) though it was in a month when the market took a dramatic step backwards.
In November 2009, the value of No. 2 shredded scrap fell by nearly $30 com-pared with the month before, and domes-
tic mills paid on average just $19-per-ton more for No. 2 shredded compared with No. 1 HMS.
November 2009 marked the narrow-est spread in the most recent 41 month span, though it is joined by a $20 spread the month before and two months with a $21 spread in 2010 as among the nar-rowest spreads.
A NARROWER VIEWA second way to calculate an average spread over time is to determine what percentage the monthly spread repre-sents of the per-ton price of No. 2 shred-ded scrap.
For example, while the $19 monthly spread in November 2009 represented the lowest spread by dollar amount, that figure represented 8.05 percent of the $160-per-ton domestic mills paid for shredded scrap that month.
By percentage, recyclers were re-warded the least for shredded scrap in May of 2010, when the $21 spread be-tween the two grades represented just 5.90 percent of the $365-per-ton paid by domestic mills for shredded scrap.
The $80 spread in July of 2008 rep-resented 13.42 percent of the $596-per-ton paid by domestic mills for the No. 2 shredded grade that month. That per-centage is well above those in the low
By Brian Taylor
Shredded Scrap vs. HMS, 2008-2011
No. 2 Shred/Avg. $ Per Ton
No. 1 HMS/Avg. $ Per Ton
Avg. SpreadAvg. of Spread as
Percentage of No. 2 Shred Price
$352.51 $315.24 $37.02 10.86%
Source: RMDAS, MSA Inc., http://rmdas.msa.com
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market analysis
months mentioned in the previous para-graph but is not among the five highest “reward” months for ferrous shred.
Using this measure, shredder opera-tors received their healthiest premium when the ferrous scrap market was strug-gling in November of 2008. Domestic mills paid just $160 per ton for ferrous shred—but that was at a $41 spread over No. 1 HMS, representing 25.63 percent of the total price of No. 2 shredded scrap.
The following month, shredder op-erators were rewarded with a $47-per-ton spread over No. 1 HMS, representing 19.75 percent of the total price of No. 2 shredded scrap.
The trend as the market has slowly returned from its trough in late 2008, however, has been for this monthly per-centage figure (the spread divided by the per-ton price for No. 2 shred) to narrow.
Over the 41-month period, the spread
between No. 1 HMS and No. 2 shredded scrap has averaged 10.86 percent of the $352-per-ton paid for No. 2 shred.
The most months when this figure was more than 10 percent, however, was between January 2008 and June 2009.
In the most recent 23 months, only once has that monthly spread been more than 10 percent of the per-ton cost of No. 2 shredded scrap—and only barely—in December 2009 at 10.20 percent.
Shredder Payoff (Months when Spread as Percentage of No. 2 Shred Price was the Highest)
Month No. 2 Shred/$ per ton No. 1 HMS/$ per ton SpreadSpread as % of
No. 2 Shred Price
Nov. 2008 $160 $119 $41 25.63%
Dec. 2008 $238 $191 $47 19.75%
Jan. 2009 $250 $201 $49 19.60%
Sept. 2008 $378 $306 $72 19.05%
Aug. 2008 $541 $463 $78 14.42%
Source: RMDAS, MSA Inc., http://rmdas.msa.com
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Recovery Q3
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During the market’s recent relatively stable stretch from January 2010 to May 2011, the spread’s percentage of the per-ton price for No. 2 shredded scrap has averaged 7.83 percent.
Recyclers have learned not to count on conditions staying the same for long, so to try to identify something as a trend is a dubious exercise.
However, since July of 2009 the dif-ference that domestic mills will pay for
shredded scrap compared with HMS has settled at below 10 percent of the total value of No. 2 shredded scrap—no mat-ter how much the per-ton price moves up or down every 30 days.
This is in stark contrast to the January 2008 to June 2009 period, when in each of those 18 months the spread mills paid was always more than 10 percent of the per-ton cost of No. 2 shredded scrap and averaged 14.49 percent..
If the volume of shred is now match-ing demand to the point where the pre-mium has narrowed, it will test shredder owners to keep their operating costs low and to wring the highest quality and larg-est volume of ferrous and nonferrous scrap from their plants.
The author is associate publisher and editorial director of Recycling Today and can be contacted at [email protected].
provided by
A Narrower Margin (Months when Spread as Percentage of No. 2 Shred Price was the Lowest)
Month No. 2 Shred/$ per ton No. 1 HMS/$ per ton SpreadSpread as % of
No. 2 Shred Price
May-10 $356 $335 $21 5.90%
Jul-10 $319 $298 $21 6.58%
Oct. 2010 $342 $318 $24 7.02%
Jun-10 $345 $319 $26 7.34%
Nov. 2010 $361 $334 $27 7.48%Source: RMDAS, MSA Inc., http://rmdas.msa.com
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market analysis
Reports on scrap metal supply and demand have been delivered at recycling conventions held throughout the world in the first half of 2011.
DistantD i s p a t c h e s
By Brian Taylor
Recovery Q3
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The BIR World Recycling Congress in Singapore this spring attracted recyclers from around the world.
supply and demand” as the main factors in copper pricing.
Glen Gross of P i t t s b u r g h - b a s e d Wimco Metals, was not as convinced, referring to fund in-vestors in the copper market as “ghosts that haunt and influence our daily business.” Said Gross, “They are the unseen financial flows that regularly rocket and torpedo our markets. Today, because of these ghosts, I find that markets act the op-posite of what our brains tell us. Manag-ing risk seems to consume an inordinate amount of our time and has created the most challenges.”
Guest speaker Miguel Garcia of Spain’s LaFarga Lacambra gave the point of view of a red metal scrap consumer. “The markets for raw materials follow a cyclical model based on supply and demand,” he commented. “In the 21st century, the sharp increase in demand had as an effect a tripling of the prices of [red] metals between 2002 and 2008.”
Recyclers and scrap consumers are poised to benefit from the “scarcity of natural resources,” said Garcia. “The recycling of raw materials will become an important industrial activity. A world market for ‘green’ products and services is expected to double [in revenue] from 2011 to 2020.”
Several scrap companies combined to sponsor hedge fund manager, author and frequent financial commentator Jim Rogers as the guest speaker at the BIR’s Ferrous Division meeting.
During his presentation and as he answered questions from attendees after-ward, Rogers made clear his opinion that producers of basic materials and holders of raw materials would play a pivotal role in the global economy in the next
10 years.Although petro-
leum scarcity may be the most prominent example of why natu-ral resources and raw materials markets will be bullish, Rogers said, “The supply of nearly all raw mate-rials is declining at a time when demand is going up. It’s why raw materials are now in a bull market that will go on for some time.”
Speaking to his audience of met-als recyclers, Rogers added, “You’re in the
right place at the right time. You guys, everybody loves—they love what you do. You’re not evil financiers.”
China’s production and consumption of steel and other raw materials has been a major factor and would continue to be, said Rogers. He was less optimistic about India developing along the same lines.
The steel and ferrous scrap industries may be tied into a “raw materials bub-ble,” said Rogers, but he doesn’t see that bubble popping until 2018 or 2020.
The 2011 BIR World Recycling Con-gress was May 23-25 at the Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore.
CHINA INTERNATIONAL METAL RECYCLING CONFERENCE, GUANGZHOUWhen Christian Rubach, president of the BIR Ferrous Division, looks at the world now vs. 10 years ago, he sees a number of roads that have led to Asia and to in-creased secondary commodity use.
Speaking to delegates of the Fourth China International Metal Recycling Conference, Rubach, who also is a se-nior advisor with Germany’s TSR Recy-clingGmbH & Co., said the recycling
the scrap metal markets move fast from day to day or month to month, and in the first half of
2011 so too have those who process and trade scrap metal.
The spring months of 2011 brought with them several opportunities for met-als recyclers to attend industry confer-ences and conventions to trade, gather information and shop for the equipment that will prepare their scrap commodities for shipment.
Following are summaries of some of the sessions and programs that took place at three different conferences or conventions in the first half of 2011.
BIR, SINGAPOREAt the Nonferrous Division Meeting at the 2011 Bureau of International Recy-cling (BIR) World Recycling Congress, Division President Robert Stein of Alter Trading, St. Louis, asked guest speakers to consider whether copper has become “the next gold.”
Stein pointed to “the startling way in which this metal has displayed its resil-ience to economic disaster,” adding, “No industrialized economy on Earth can do without it; it is a vital ingredient in infrastructural growth and it attracts attention almost unknown among its base metal counterparts.”
Beyond its industrial demand, Stein said of copper, “The commodity has been financialized to a much higher de-gree than ever as the investment com-munity continues to use the metal as a source of leveraged speculation.”
Guest speaker Christian Schirmeister of J.P. Morgan Metals, London, noted that copper inventories had been build-ing in China. “It will take some time, but these stocks will find their ways to con-sumers,” he remarked.
Schirmeister did not express alarm about the increased use of ETFs (ex-change-traded funds) as a way to invest in copper, saying the “financial sector still does not replace underlying physical
provided by
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market analysis
important. If there are [restrictive] export laws, the whole system will not work.”
Rubach pointed to Russia and Ukraine as nations where scrap export barriers have been erected. “This has a big effect on Turkey,” he commented. “It then looks to Europe and the East Coast of the United States” for ferrous scrap.
Regarding when China’s steel produc-tion would plateau and when it would be self-sufficient in ferrous scrap, Rubach pointed to a recent study that predicted that China should reach its steelmaking plateau in 2024 or slightly earlier.
China’s ability to supply its own steel-makers with scrap will not necessarily occur then, said Rubach, because much of China’s scrap reservoir will still be
part of buildings and large public works structures.
In the near term, nations like Turkey and China that need to import scrap could run into supply issues or problems “getting enough scrap if the economies of the United States and European Union improve,” said Rubach.
“In the long run, there will always be enough scrap, but in the short-term there can be lacks of scrap and tight iron ore markets,” Rubach concluded. “This shows we need to make recycling even more important than it already is today.”
The Fourth China International Metal Recycling Conference, organized by the Metallurgical Council of the China
industry now employs some 1.6 million people worldwide and collects, trades and processes some 800 million metric tons of secondary commodities.
Much of the recent growth in recy-cling has been spurred by the surge in economic activity in China and other Asian nations, Rubach noted. He showed a chart of the world’s largest companies (based on market capitalization) in 2000 and in early 2011 and pointed to the ma-jor differences.
“In 2000, [these] companies came largely from the U.S.A. and Japan and were mostly technology and telecom-munication companies,” he said of a list that contained Cisco Systems, Vodafone, NTT Docomo and Nippon Telegraph.
“In 2011, the mining and en-ergy industries have taken the lead, and three of the 10 largest companies are from China,” he said of the updated list that con-tains Petrochina, two Chinese banks, Petrobras of Brazil and BHP Billiton of Australia.
Fund managers also are in-vesting in a newer financial in-strument—the exchange-traded commodity fund (ETF).
Citing information from the FAZ research report by United States-based Direxion Funds, Ru-bach showed attendees how in-vestors had placed some $7 bil-lion in commodity-centric ETFs as of early 2006. By the end of 2010, that figure had grown to $163 billion invest-ed in exchange-traded commodity secu-rities. “The financial sector is heavily in-vesting in raw materials,” stated Rubach.
In the recycling industry, Asia’s growth has meant that Turkey (steelmak-er for the fast-growing, oil-rich Persian Gulf region) has become a major ferrous scrap importer, bringing in from 15 to 19 million metric tons of ferrous scrap year-ly since 2006. South Korea has remained an active scrap importer, while China and India have become larger importers.
“We see a global imbalance of scrap availability vs. scrap demand,” said Ru-bach. The situation “makes free trade so
Council for the Promotion of Internation-al Trade (MC-CCPIT), was May 13-14, 2011, in Guangzhou, China.
ISRI, LOS ANGELESFerrous scrap markets were the topic of numerous sessions at the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries Inc. (ISRI) Convention & Exposition, held in April in Los Angeles.
Panelists at the Ferrous Spotlight ses-sion included Randy Ehret of steelmaker Timken Co., Canton, Ohio. Ehret said Timken had recently purchased a mid-sized scrap yard in Akron, Ohio.
While Timken was uncertain whether it would purchase more yards, Ehret said “there is a logical rea-son” for a steel company to own a scrap company: “Those [steel companies] who do not have ac-cess to assured supply will be at a disadvantage.”
Patrick McCormick of World Steel Exchange, based in Engle-wood Cliffs, N.J., said “everyone is concerned about price vola-tility” in the steel supply chain, from steel consumers to scrap suppliers.
McCormick said he saw a scrap reservoir that was large enough to meet demand for scrap, though it often strained to
do so. In those stretches where demand recedes, China will step in “when [fer-rous scrap] is a great buy.”
He also noted that China’s ferrous scrap deficit was bound to shrink as obsolete consumer products begin to hit scrap yards there. However, as that point nears, China’s central government may encourage the construction of more electric arc furnace (EAF) steel mills.
The 2011 ISRI Annual Convention was held at the Los Angeles Convention Center April 6-9.
The author is associate publisher and editorial director of Recycling Today and can be reached at [email protected].
provided by
Inside a session room at the Fourth China International Metal Recycling Conference.
operational perspective
19Q2Recovery
FinerThings
The
The new FinesSort® Jr. from
Eriez helps Clayton County
Recycling secure a higher
recovery rate on small fines.
Clayton County Recycling, in the heart of Iowa, has come a long way since
starting from scratch as an auto salvage yard, according to owner Fred
Runde. With more than 75 employees today and a variety of modern pro-
cessing equipment, this multi-site scrap recycling operation continues on a profit-
able scale by recovering the most metal possible from its 80/104 shredder using a
new compact FinesSort® Jr. from Eriez.
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operational perspective
Clayton County Recycling actually began in 1988 in Belmont, Wis., as a one-yard auto salvage operation. Runde expanded the company in 1994 by pur-chasing 10 acres of cornfield adjacent to a railroad line in Monona, Iowa. Today, the company owns feeder yards in Madi-son, Holmen and Wonewoc, Wis., along with the original yard in Belmont.
The feeder yards, according to Runde, play a vital role in supplying suitable scrap consisting of old car bodies and parts, obsolete appliances and outdated agricultural equipment. The feeder yards are strategically located within 80 to 100 miles of the company’s main shredder operation in Monona, which has now become the hub of Clayton County Re-cycling’s operations.
“Our shredder went online in 2006, allowing us to become more than a shearing, sorting and baling yard here in Monona,” Runde says. “At that time, we installed one eddy current separator that gave us the ability to recover nonfer-rous metals. That was great, but we still needed something else for fines 1 inch and smaller. We ran our fines over the same eddy current at the end of the day when regular production was finished, but found that even after running them twice, we still were not getting all the metal out.”
That’s when Runde contacted Eriez, a Pennsylvania-based company known for designing individual units or complete
systems for the recycling industry. After some analysis and investiga-
tion into Clayton County Recycling’s operation, engineers at Eriez developed a unique smaller scale metal recovery system to handle 1-inch and smaller fines. The new FinesSort Jr. was installed at Clayton County Recycling in fall of 2009, according to Runde.
With the new equipment, Clayton County Recycling now processes up to 30 tons of fluff per hour, with the fines going directly to the FinesSort Jr. and the remainder of the shredder fluff going to the company’s original eddy current separator.
DRAWING A FINE LINETypically, scrap yard operators have been concerned with reclaiming larger sized pieces of nonferrous metal. The smaller sized materials that pass through the initial screening process are some-times discarded and sent to landfill.
This smaller material, referred to as fines, can represent up to 40 percent of the original total flow. Within the fines, generally less than 5 percent is recy-clable metal, depending on the mix of material being shredded. Although 5 percent of the fines or just 1 percent of the total stream might seem insignificant, reclaiming these valuable metals can be
An example of the nonferrous metals recovered from the auto shredder fluff Clayton County Recycling is processing with its Eriez Fine Sort Jr., which uses a 24-inch axial interpole pulley magnet and a 60-inch Eriez Xtreme Eddy Current Separator.
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operational perspective
worth hundreds of thousands of dollars annually for scrap yard operators.
A number of larger recycling centers across the country have installed Eriez’ FinesSort multi-stage Metal Recovery System. The system contains a vibratory feeder, rare earth pulley magnet, rare earth drum magnet and a permanent magnetic eddy current separator.
Eriez engineered the FinesSort Jr. for recycling operators like Clayton County, which need a smaller-scale system to re-cover fine metal particles and maintain profitability.
Essentially, the FinesSort Jr. is built with a 24-inch axial interpole pulley
magnet and a 60-inch Eriez Xtreme Eddy Current Separator. This design was more than adequate for Clayton County to recover 1-inch and smaller fines in one pass while using a separate eddy current separator to recover larger particles, ac-cording to Runde.
NOW PART OF THE PROCESSAt Clayton County Recycling, the pro-cessing starts when scrap metal is routed into its 2,500-horsepower, 80/104 shred-der, manufactured by St. Louis-based
American Pulverizer. The shredder han-dles 85 tons per hour, or the equivalent of 700 tons per day, of scrap, according to Runde.
The nonferrous material trapped in the shredder fluff is then conveyed into a tumble-back conveyor, which helps meter the pulverized material into a 20-foot-long-by-6-feet-in-diameter trom-mel screen.
As the material tumbles through the trommel screen, it is diverted to separate belt conveyors. Any material 1 inch or larger heads to the original eddy current separator; any smaller material heads into the FinesSort Jr.
The recovered fines product emanat-ing from the FinesSort Jr. is so clean that Runde is able to get a premium price for the material. He also points out that his crew has re-run the rejected material and can find no significant amount of metal on the second pass. That’s good for Clay-ton County, knowing it isn’t sending any appreciable amount of metal or profit to the landfill.
“The FinesSort Jr. was specifically in-stalled to recover the 1-inch and smaller fines, aluminum, brass and copper,” Runde says. “The goal was better recov-ery of the metal content, especially since it contains a lot of dirt. This system got us a cleaner product and more metal than the original eddy ever could. We are very pleased with the FinesSort Jr. It does a great job.”
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products
DensitySort® Air TableA Media Free Option for Fines Sorting
The DensitySort® Air Table is designed to sort nonferrous fines into light and heavy fractions. This can significantly improve value.
The DensitySort Air Table uses air, vibration and slope to separate the fines fraction. It does not require a media base, such as sand, water or filtration.
As product is fed at the high point of the table’s slope, its specific mass directs the product to the low or high side of the table, providing an upgraded high grade aluminum product (twitch) and a heavy product containing nearly 80 percent heavy metals by weight.
Once a fluidized bed of material is maintained, the heavy products sink to the bottom of the burden and travel up the table to a discharge point. The light fraction remains on top of the burden and travels to the low side of the table. Any product that does not get separated on the first pass recirculates until it reaches the appropriate discharge.
The DensitySort can process 0.25-inch-by-1-inch and 1-inch-by-2-inch fractions without changing the machine’s setup.
More information is available at http://en-us.eriez.com/Products/Markets/Recycling/densitysorttm.
A look at product offerings from Eriez designed for the scrap industry to boost productivity and material quality.
Xtreme® Eddy Current SeparatorsEriez’ Xtreme® Eddy Current Separators feature a concentric rotor design and utilize Xtreme rare earth magnets to induce eddy currents into metallic particles, producing repelling forces that separate metallics from non-metallics.
Xtreme Eddy Current Separators are designed to separate aluminum and other nonferrous metals from infeed material de-rived from electronic scrap, automobile shredder residue, trash, co-mingled recyclables and more.
The Shred1™ Ballistic Separator from Eriez uses ballistics to separate iron-rich ferrous scrap from much of the mixed metals and waste material in the post-drum-magnet flow. The Shred1 delivers three distinct fractions: a premium, low-copper content No. 1 shred; a traditional No. 2 shred; and a heavy/light/waste mix.
When the Shred1 is combined with Eriez’ P-Rex® permanent rare-earth mag-netic drum, the system is referred to as the CleanStream™ Process. The CleanStream Process is designed to recover more fer-rous and to concentrate 75 percent of the post-drum-magnet flow into a low-copper premium shred. It also eliminates the need for a scavenger magnet, a z-box air system and hand picking the entire flow.
The Shred1 Ballistic Separator can produce the following fractions:
• A high-value, low-copper content ferrous product with a higher value than
Shred1™ Ballistic Separator a No. 2 shred fraction. Fraction one rep-resents 60 to 80 percent of the incoming material flow and contains less than 0.2 percent copper.
• Fraction two is approximately 20 to 30 percent of the incoming material flow and contains mostly mixed metals, cop-per and aluminum with steel housings or cores. Hand sorting can be accomplished with relatively few pickers because only a fraction of the total shredder discharge must be picked.
• Fraction three consists of heavy steel objects and light material, such as fluff, rubber and some wire. This fraction can be picked with the second fraction or stock piled and reprocessed later. Fraction three contains 5 to 7 percent of the incoming material flow.
More information is available at http://en-us.eriez.com/Products/Markets/Recycling/shred1ballisticseparator.
RecoveRy
With 12 manufacturing plants on six continents and a global network of factory-trained representatives, getting professional assistance with your toughest processing problems is quite simple. You may reach our plants by any of the following means:
United StatesPhone: 814-835-6000Fax: [email protected]
AustraliaPhone: 61-3-9305-4099Fax: [email protected]
ChinaPhone: 86-21-31261766Fax: [email protected]
EuropePhone: 44-29-208-68501Fax: [email protected]
IndiaPhone: 91-44-2238-5071Fax: [email protected]
JapanPhone: 81-473-546381Fax: [email protected]
MexicoPhone: 52-55-5321-9800Fax: [email protected]
South AfricaPhone: 27-11-444-9160Fax: [email protected]
eriez worldwide
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“Our waste is virtually Metal Free”Rubino Brothers installed Eriez’ FinesSort®
and ProSort sorters to improve metal recovery.The chart to the left is an analysis of the their metal recovery rates of post-eddy waste since their installation. If you’re interested inachieving these types of results, contact Eriez at 1-888-300-ERIEZ to schedule a free production-scale test!
Call 888-300-3743 or visit eriez.com
FinesSort®- Metal “Fines” Recovery
Eddy Current Separators
ProSort - Airless Metal RecoveryFREE! Brochures & DVD
Recovery increase of:
+76% Stainless Steel+47% Copper Pickings and Wire+17% Zorba Product+7% Nonferrous Fines <1-inch
(@ 1,000 lbs/hr)And a Fluff reduction of:
-10% Fluff to the landfill
“Our waste is virtually “metal free”… and now
we’re able to sell high-grade fractions that used to be sent to landfill. Eriez’ sorters haveproven to be reliable and the
company very responsive.“
Rubino Brothers - Stamford, CT
“Our waste is virtually “metal free”… and now
we’re able to sell high-grade fractions that used to be sent to landfill. Eriez’ sorters haveproven to be reliable and the
company very responsive.“
Rubino Brothers - Stamford, CT
Ferrous and Nonferrous Recovery Solutions
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