Nonferrous scrap traders could face a major disruption courtesy of proposed (but not yet finalized) Chinese trade regulations, according to Ma Hongchang, a consultant in Chinese affairs for the Brussels-based Bureau of International Recycling (BIR). He provided an update on the matter at the Non-Ferrous Metals Division meeting at the 2017 World Recycling Convention, held in late May in Hong Kong.

Ma said China’s Central Committee indicated April 18 that it intended to phase in a policy to create “a drastic reduction in both the quantities and items [of scrap] imported [into China]."

“Base metal prices have started a long-term cyclical upturn.” – John Browning, BANDS Financial Ltd.

He added, “As far as I know, regarding nonferrous metal scrap, scrap motors, scrap wire and cable and mixed metal scrap will be prohibited after the end of 2018.”

In 2017, the multiagency National Sword campaign in China has resulted in raids on plastic and metals recycling firms in provinces and cities throughout China, with more than 150 people arrested for activities considered as “smuggling,” Ma said.

BIR Non-Ferrous Division Chairman David Chiao of Atlanta-based Uni-All Ltd., said BIR is working with the Washington-based Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI) and China’s CMRA (which represents nonferrous scrap recyclers). He said the groups are “doing our best to solve this issue,” which is considered “a severe threat” to how business is currently conducted.

Delivering better news was John Browning of Hong Kong-based BANDS Financial Ltd., who said, “Base metal prices have started a long-term cyclical upturn.” Part of the reason, he said, is China’s “One Belt One Road” spending initiative, which will involve more big-ticket, metals-consuming infrastructure projects.

“As far as I know, regarding nonferrous metal scrap, scrap motors, scrap wire and cable and mixed metal scrap will be prohibited after the end of 2018.” – Ma Hongchang, a consultant to the BIR

Ongoing global demand should help metals producers catch up with the increased capacity of the past several years, which caused “base metals [pricing to be] in decline from 2011 to 2016,” Browning said.

While metals production capacity has increased from 2011 to 2016, he said, mining expansions were halted. Even if metals prices rise, “Creating a new mine can take five to eight years,” Browning said, meaning an ore supply deficit could last several years—likely good news for scrap traders.

Cohen employee receives ISRI’s Golden Wrench Award

The Washington-based Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI) has presented Forrest Matheny of Cohen, Middletown, Ohio, with a Golden Wrench Award for exhibiting outstanding efforts, achievements and contributions during a career in vehicle maintenance that spans more than 25 years.

“Through a strong track record of safety, training background and mentorship of others, Forrest Matheny exemplifies the meaning behind the Golden Wrench Award,” says Commodor Hall, ISRI transportation safety director. “Not only does Forrest have the credentials that exceed the award’s requirements but [also] the strong testimonials from co-workers, customers and vendors on his behalf show him to be a quality, caring human being that takes safety to heart. It is with great pleasure that we honor him with this award.”

Matheny has worked at Cohen since 1993. He serves as a shop supervisor with responsibilities that include all maintenance on the company’s fleet of equipment. In addition, Matheny purchases equipment and supervises a team of mechanics.

“The ISRI Golden Wrench award to me is more than being a great mechanic, it is about being a leader,” says Todd Will, transportation manager for Cohen. “Forrest leads by example with a strong work ethic and for reinforcing core values of respect, appreciation and dedication. Forrest’s safety record has been nearly perfect for his entire career. Forrest uses his experience and knowledge to mentor and to help train our company’s younger, less-experienced mechanics, drivers and managers. Forrest lives our mission every single day and has quickly adopted ISRI’s Circle of Safety Excellence’s mantra, ‘Safely or not at all.’”

To be considered for the Golden Wrench Award, candidates must be nominated by someone familiar with their work history, such as a supervisor or safety director. Nominees also must be full-time employees who have been employed by the member company for a minimum of one year and whose primary responsibility is to maintain commercial motor vehicles; meet the minimum requirement of five years of verifiable employment as a commercial motor vehicle (CMV) maintenance technician; have a minimum of 40 hours qualified medium/heavy and or auto/light truck maintenance training (within the last three years); have completed National Institute of Automotive Service Excellence (ASE) medium/heavy truck or auto/light truck test completion and current certification within the last five years; and hold a current commercial driver’s license (A, B or C class).

Additionally, a member company Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) vehicle maintenance performance score cannot exceed 60 percent (CSA Threshold 80 percent) or have a record of CSA intervention letters/alert notices within the past 24 months (in any of the CSA Seven BASICs (Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories).

The award was presented to Matheny at the ISRI2017 convention in New Orleans. In addition to travel to and lodging at the convention, he received a crystal award and a personalized certificate.

ISRI also honored other industry professionals at its annual conference, including Safe Driver of the Year Award and two Lifetime Achievement Awards.

While optical sorters commonly are used to sort paper in material recovery facilities (MRFs) that handle single-stream commercial material, their use on residential fiber sort lines is increasing for a variety of reasons, according to industry sources.

“The new Chinese regulations of no more than 3 percent contamination within fiber are causing all kinds of labor issues,” John Green, president of Green Machine, Hampstead, New Hampshire, says, referring to that country’s National Sword inspection program for incoming recyclables and its impact on operators of single-stream residential MRFs. “Added labor is expensive and so is slowing the line down,” he says. “It’s becoming more expensive to sort single stream.”

Machinex Executive Vice President of Sales and Business Development Chris Hawn, who works out of the Quebec-based company’s High Point, North Carolina, office, says optical sorting of paper is more prevalent because “it is a true recognition of the different fibers from one another.”

Justifications for adding optics

Sources contacted for this article say that when it comes to using optical sorters for paper, in general, a frequently used phrase is “it just depends.” From whether optical sorters make sense in residential MRFs to where they should be positioned to create optimal performance to how much volume a MRF should be processing before considering adding optics to its fiber line affect whether such installations can be cost justified.

“I recommend those who are considering deploying optics go through the exercise of completing a pro forma,” Green says. “It’s generally part of [Green Machine’s] offering. We look at the economics behind the deployment of optics through labor savings, increased throughputs and material values. It’s not an inexpensive endeavor to add a system like this.”

Green says his residential MRF customers primarily use optical sorters to recover plastics. When deployed on fiber lines, either clean fiber is sorted or contaminants, such as containers and brown grades, are targeted. Green Machine’s optical accelerator conveyors in residential MRFs are wide and fast, allowing for better material spread, which will allow its patented hyperspectral technology to identify multiple materials, he says. Individually activated air jet ejectors are located on ?-inch centers, which Green says is “imperative to surgically remove contaminants from fiber sort belts.”

In terms of spectroscopy, Green recommends hyperspectral technologies, calling them “far superior than anything else on the market.” He says this technology can identify individual grades of paper and all other commodities simultaneously and three dimensionally and decide whether to positively or negatively sort the material in real time. Patented hyperspectral imagers are used in all Green Machine’s Green Eye optical sorters.

“With this type of technology, we’re able to identify all types of fibers and color,” Green says. “We can sort sorted office paper from cardboard from kraft paper from news—long fiber, short fiber—it’s able to identify all grades of fibers individually or collectively.”

A typical residential MRF features one to three fiber lines. According to Green, it makes the most sense to place the optical sorter on the most contaminated line because the machine can catch more contaminants than hand sorting. For Green Machine, he says the goal is a 97 percent clean stream, and, while some manufacturers boast a 99 percent clean stream, the minimum market requirements are more realistic. “The point is to maximize tonnage while meeting minimal market criteria,” Green says.

Education and contamination

For MSS Inc. in Nashville, Tennessee, contamination is one of the greatest factors to consider when adding optics on the fiber lines of residential MRFs. This is because, Sales Director Felix Hottenstein says, “on the residential side, we’re using it to clean up news or mixed paper, not to sort higher grades.”

Residential MRFs that use MSS optical sorters have two things in common: high volumes and high contamination levels. However, he adds, “You need to have the right volume and material coming in that’s not too contaminated, or else you won’t get a higher grade.”

Optical sorters typically are installed in residential MRFs when they operate at 25 tons to 30 tons per hour with an average material stream composition. If the tonnage is lower, installing an optical sorter isn’t justifiable unless the material is extremely contaminated.

Hottenstein says MSS customers using optical sorters on their residential fiber lines offer three reasons for doing so: improved technology, reduction of manual labor and improved material quality.

Hottenstein says eight hand sorters on a line can make about 400 picks per hour, but optical sorters can make about 2,000 picks in that same time

“The savings on the manual labor is the last reason,” he says of MRF operators objectives when adding optical sorting on their residential fiber lines.

While optical sorters normally are used to sort plastic bottles, MSS can replace the sensor head and reroute the conveyor to sort fiber.

Hawn suggests moving from the VIS-NIR (visible near-infrared) spectroscopy typically found in MRFs to either a SWIR (short-wave infrared) or IR (infrared) spectroscopy to segregate fiber, but he says some suppliers are using IR thermography to sort by grammage (thickness).

“For that technique to work, you need to have control on your infeed material’s temperature and humidity,” he says.

While making the plunge to install an optical sorter on a residential MRF’s fiber line can be intimidating, Hottenstein says the advancing technology makes the justification undeniable.

“I think we made quite a big step in the last two years, especially in the last two to three months,” he says. “It’s a matter of whether you save enough labor to justify it. New specifications and the need for cleaner paper from the China situation may cause more need for optical sorters, especially on the residential side. Bigger machines are more expensive, but you have to do what you have to do. You either have to save money or make money.”

The author is the assistant editor of the Recycling Today Media Group and can be contacted at hcrisan@gie.net.

Making money from auto shredder residue (ASR) requires more than simply bringing cars in the front gate. A huge factor, as Earl Weber Jr., owner of Garden Street Iron and Metal in Cincinnati, knows, is recovering all the metals possible. That means the big stuff and the fines. Gathering fines not only adds to the amount of aluminum, copper, stainless and other metals recovered, it also reduces expenses on the back end.

Keeping an eye on details is one reason the family-owned operation is celebrating its 55th year in business this year. “Our goal is to recover more metal out of the fluff,” Weber says. He figures Garden Street’s installation of an Eriez FineSort allows the company to do just that.

“Our goal is to pull more minus-5-millimeter material out of the fluff,” Weber says. “We are getting an extra 3 percent, conservatively.”

He says he is less fixed on the exact percentage than he is on knowing that Garden Street’s processing line is more efficient and effective. “I don’t have as much of a trash bill for shredder residue,” Weber says.

Think small

“Fines are something that can’t be overlooked anymore,” agrees Ryan Njavro, general manager for ferrous and nonferrous products at U.S. Shredder and Castings Group, headquartered in Miramar Beach, Florida. “The value is huge, and the system is too easy to operate now not to use.”

A microfines system can recover materials as small as 1 millimeter. This can be done on and off location, Njavro says.

Today, small to midsize shredder operators represent 90 percent of the market, according to Bill Close, applications engineer at Wendt Corp., Buffalo, New York. He says all those shredder operators should be making fines and ultrafines concentrates for sale to others. Simple and relatively inexpensive technologies, such as screening, magnetic separators, high-frequency eddy current separators (ECS), ultra-high-frequency ECS, ballistic separators and air prep, all play a role in creating concentrates for others to upgrade.

The remaining 10 percent of the market—those with large shredders or multiple shredders located closely together—have the volume to consider making additional investments that put them in the position to make high-quality refinery products. “These same fines processors will be in the business of buying the concentrates from the other 90 percent of the market,” Close says.

Fines often are referred to as “undersize” materials. Eventually, a high volume of fines will result in quality and profit issues for companies that do not ride herd on their operations.

“Fines ASR will typically constitute anywhere from 40 to 60 percent (by weight) of the ASR,” says Mike Shattuck, market manager of recycling for Eriez, Erie Pennsylvania. ASR fines can contain up to 60 percent ferrous dirt, which needs to be removed prior to processing.

“In today’s market, a SGM Micro-Fines Plant (MFP) can earn $50 to $55 per ton of ASR fines processed, or $4 to $5 per ton of shredder infeed,” says Didier Haegelsteen, managing director of SGM Magnetics, with North American headquarters in Bradenton, Florida.

He notes that the figure will vary from operation to operation, depending on the shredder feedstock and the equipment installed at the residue plant. Regardless of where on the spectrum a recycler falls, Haegelsteen says his company’s system will leave no more than 0.2 percent of nonferrous metals in the MFP (microfines plant) waste.

In a typical auto shredding system, roughly 2 percent to 3 percent of the fines stream is nonferrous, with an additional 5 to 7.5 percent being ferrous, according to Haegelsteen.

Concentrated effort

A certain volume of fines must be generated before a recycler can consider investing in fines recovery equipment. Njavro says he would like to see around 1,000 tons per month going to the landfill. “In some cases, lately people are seeing their 5/8-inch and under [fines] making up 50 percent of the total weight generated in ASR,” he says.

Close says 1.5 percent of the typical total ASR stream easily can be concentrated with screening and ECS technologies that are well-applied. An additional 0.75 percent can be concentrated using sensor-based and other technologies. Shredder operations of all sizes can benefit from screening and ECS technologies, while midsize and large shredder operations can benefit from the addition of sensor-based technologies.

“All recyclers should make concentrates,” Close says, adding that some should go even further.

In automobile shredding operations, typically nonferrous materials less than 1 inch in size are considered fines. Materials smaller than 1/4-inch are considered by most as microfines. ASR fines are typically treated magnetically not only to remove the saleable ferrous that is present but also to remove the ferritic dirt.

As much as 10 percent nonferrous can be recovered from the ASR between the zorba fraction and the microfines. “It’s fair to say with the correct ferrous recovery system you could pull a few percent on top of your nonferrous with clean ferrous material,” Njavro says.

“Magnetic dirt will affect the recovery and grade of the zorba product produced on the eddy current,” Shattuck says. “For fines material, we will typically use eddy current separators with additional poles (frequency changes) to react better with the smaller nonferrous metals,” he says. The process for microfines is similar; however, the ECS will have more frequency changes.

In fact, one of the main reasons nonferrous metals are lost in ASR fines is because of the entrapment of that valuable fraction in the magnetic dirt. Haegelsteen says that can represent 30 percent to 40 percent of the fines.

“The higher the moisture content of the fines, the more entrapment and the higher the loss of valuable metals in the magnetic dirt fraction,” he says.

Making it work

When Garden Street purchased its FineSort, the company’s goal was to recover 1-inch-minus ASR. However, the line failed to capture some of the finer nonferrous metals. So, Weber purchased another ESC to follow the FineSort. The strategy was to set the FineSort up to produce a dirty zorba, which then passes to the second ECS for further cleaning.

Weber says he is recovering an additional 400 pounds of zorba per hour.

When Weber sold the zorba his operation was producing, he was getting deducted for the 1/4-inch-minus microfines of nonferrous metals that were present. That material would flash off when introduced into a smelter. He decided to buy another ECS, which he uses to cull the microfines.

“We get a mix of aluminum, copper and zinc but not iron,” Weber says. “It tends to run high in copper. There are lots of small wires that we were missing that we now get.”

Garden Street’s microfines output is high in reds, running 20 percent or more. The company also captures a lot of bare copper wire.

The misses from the FineSort, which contain that fine bare copper wire, and the misses from the second ECS with the intentional losses of the 1/4-inch-minus aluminum are presented to an ultra-high-frequency ECS to recover the microfines.

This process is netting more than 300 pounds of microfines per hour, which puts a smile on the face of 87-year-old Earl Weber Sr., who still works from 6 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at Garden Street

Recovery targets

In addition to ASR, among the other applications that generate recoverable metallic fines are electronics recycling, ash from municipal solid waste incineration and wire chopping, Haegelsteen says.

Wherever the operation, certain areas almost always will profit from a once-over on the fines system. Be aware, however, that such special situations require a bit of rethinking in terms of handling the product, sources say.

“Every processor, regardless of capacity, should at least have basic recovery on the fines ASR,” Shattuck states. “ROI (return on investment) is typically short with the high volumes of nonferrous metal available in the minus-1-inch ASR stream,” he says.

Microfines cost a little more to recover and the percentage of metals is less, so ROI on a microfines recovery system typically will be a bit longer.

A small shredder producing 50 tons per hour typically will produce 10 tons to 12 tons of ASR per hour. This equates to 5 or 6 tons per hour of fines that can contain better than 20 percent nonferrous metals.

Fine zorba is typically sold as a zorba product. A zorba 90 would contain 90 percent metallic material and would fetch a better price than, say, a zorba 70.

Sizing materials is critical to success, Close says, adding that higher volumes and tighter cuts will improve the efficiency of all separators. To that end, his company now offers newly patented ECS technology that recovers metals more efficiently and more cost-effectively, he says.

Most processors earn a small premium for zorba fines over the regular (1-inch-plus) zorba because the red metals percentage is typically much higher. This is what Garden Street realized.

“I’d do it again for sure,” Weber says of his fines recovery project.

The author is a contributing editor to Recycling Today and can be contacted via email at curt@curtharler.com.