Alliance Metals to separate, melt shredded mixes

Leighton, Alabama-based secondary aluminum producer Alliance Metals has added the mixed shredded metals grade zorba to the scrap commodities it will use to make cast aluminum alloys.

The company’s website lists the zorba along with aluminum alloy wheels and the tense (cast aluminum) and tabor (aluminum sheet) grades of scrap as secondary commodities it purchases, in addition to insulated copper wire (ICW), zurik and a few other grades it trades in a brokerage capacity.

An early July online report by Argus Media indicates Alliance Metals President Larry Gitman “confirmed to Argus that the company intends to make alloy from zorba.”

With mixed metals facing an uncertain future in terms of clearing hurdles to enter the People’s Republic of China, the move by Allied Metals joins several other recent investments to upgrade shredded mixed metals and melt them in North America.

St. Louis-based Alter Trading Corp., which operates about 15 shredding plants, is a joint venture partner (along with Toyota Tsuho) in a shredded metals-to-aluminum alloys venture in Arkansas called Altech Recycling LLC.

Portland-based Schnitzer Steel Industries, which also operates several shredding plants, indicates it is investing in advanced processes that “will allow us to separate shredded metals into various streams of nonferrous shredded metals.”

Near Houston, Levitated Metals opened earlier this year, accepting mixed shredded metals to upgrade them into furnace-ready materials via a heavy media separation process.

The new investments will compete for nonferrous shredded grades along with remaining overseas buyers (largely in Malaysia) and longer tenured heavy media plant operators and alloys producers, including Michigan-based Huron Valley Steel, Kentucky-based Audubon Metals and Minnesota-based Spectro Alloys. (Both Huron Valley and Audubon Metals have invested in additional locations in the past three years.)

In Alabama, Alliance Metals is currently buying scrap, with its furnaces in a startup phase having not yet reached “commercial capacity,” according to Argus.