ISRI adds directors-at-large to board

The Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI), Washington, has elected three directors-at-large to its board during the association’s spring board and governance meetings. According to a news release from ISRI, Dan Garvin, Andrew Lincoln and Jacqueline Lotzkar each will serve two-year terms, ending in 2023.

Garvin of Colorado Iron & Metal in Fort Collins, Colorado, currently serves as vice-chair of ISRI’s Government Relations Committee. In addition to his current ISRI volunteer leadership roles, Garvin previously served as the ISRI Rocky Mountain Chapter president, co-chair of the ISRI Council of Chapter Presidents and Membership Committee and vice-chair of the Communications Committee.

Lincoln is vice president of Lincoln Recycling in Pennsylvania. After college, he worked for a Fortune 500 insurance company in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and in Boston before joining his family’s company.

While in Boston, Lincoln earned his MBA from Babson College.

Lincoln is a current member of ISRI’s Executive Committee. He previously served as president of ISRI’s Pittsburgh Chapter and as co-chair of the ISRI Council of Chapter Presidents.

Lotzkar is vice president of Pacific Metals Recycling International, Vancouver, representing the fourth generation of her family business. She is vice president of the Pacific Northwest Chapter of ISRI, vice chair of the Trade Committee and co-chair of the Young Executives Council in addition to participating on a number of other committees.

In addition, Lotzkar received a Master of Global Business degree from the University of Victoria and is also a certified organizational coach from the University of British Columbia.

Connect Work Tools adds three members to team

Connect Work Tools, a construction and demolition equipment manufacturer based in Superior, Wisconsin, has announced the addition of three new members to its team: Geordie Stewart, Blake Liebelt and Johnnie Gibbons.

Stewart has been named director of sales for Connect Work Tools, a division of Exodus Global, also based in Superior. Stewart is experienced in the hydraulic breaker market with more than 10 years in the industry. He also owned KGS Demolition Attachment Services, Cleburne, Texas, a company specializing in attachment distribution and full-service hammer rebuilds.  

“I have been watching the impact that Exodus Global and its divisions have had since their inception in the attachment market,” Stewart says. “I am very proud to finally be a part of this impressive company and to represent Connect Work Tools as the director of sales.”

In addition, Liebelt has joined the Connect Team as the parts manager. Liebelt most recently was the national parts manager for Okada America and was responsible for inventory management of service parts in all three of the company’s warehouses.  

“This is a game-changer for Connect Work Tools. As a company, we are deeply committed to hiring the best people and giving them all the tools to succeed,” says Rich Currie, vice president of sales. “In the hydraulic breaker world, it does not get better than Geordie and Blake.”

Gibbons has joined the company’s service team as the south-central product support manager and breaker specialist. He has more than 25 years in the industry, including 18 years with RDO Equipment in Austin, Texas, and most recently as the service manager for KGS.

“With Johnnie’s vast experience in our industry and his hydraulic knowledge, I’m confident he will be a great fit to our team, and I’m thrilled to see what this collaboration will bring,” says Brian Hawn, vice president of service at Connect Work Tools.

Tomra names regional director for the Americas

Tomra Recycling has announced that Ty Rhoad is the company’s new Americas regional director, taking over for Carlos Manchado Atienza. Rhoad will lead the company’s sales, service and project management teams in North and South America and will engage in business development activities for the Tomra’s optical sorting systems.

“Ty’s work philosophy and passion for the recycling industry is in perfect alignment with Tomra’s,” says Fabrizio Radice, vice president and global head of sales and marketing for Tomra Recycling. “He has spent the last 10 years of his career in the waste and recycling industry, leading sales teams and working with key waste and recycling companies. We are convinced he will fit in with Tomra professionally and personally to continue expanding our business in the Americas.”

Rhoad previously worked with ONM Environmental Products and Services and with Rehrig Pacific Co., where he most recently led the company’s North American sales team as director of sales. Rhoad also is a member of the Future Industry Leaders Alliance of the National Waste & Recycling Association.

“Over the years, I have developed a passion for recycling and the business,” he says. “What makes this industry so special is the contacts mature beyond the business relationships into friendships. Tomra is at the forefront of the circular economy, working toward closing the loop, and I see tremendous growth potential for our industry-leading sorting technologies in the Americas.”

Rhoad will be based in Tomra Recycling’s North American headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina. 

Tomra Recycling is a Germany-based business unit of Norway-based Tomra Systems ASA. Tomra Recycling designs and manufactures sensor-based sorting technologies for the global recycling and waste management industry. The company says nearly 10,000 units have been installed in more than 100 countries.

When the pandemic was declared in early 2020, it forced employees at many companies to switch from working in office buildings to working at their kitchen tables. It also encouraged document destruction firms to adjust their routines to fit a socially distanced workforce, and many say this newfound adaptability is a strength.

Pandemic impacts

For Don Adriaansen, CEO and president of Titan Mobile Shredding LLC, based out of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, business initially took a hit as fewer people working in office buildings meant less demand for shredding services. Despite that immediate change, the need for shredding services only wavered briefly.

“So, we saw a pretty immediate downturn in the routine service because people’s offices were closed,” Adriaansen says. “So, that part of it certainly changed. Our business mix shifted probably about 5 percent for a few months. And then it kind of started to even back out. Our volume for the year was down about 16 percent from the end of 2019 to 2020. Our 2021 will certainly turn out better than 2020, [but] I don’t anticipate being quite to the level of 2019.”

Because many of Titan’s customers shifted their employees to remote work, they either altered their service frequency or canceled altogether. This resulted in short-term layoffs of Titan personnel during this period and staffing issues further down the line, Adriaansen says.

“Our biggest challenge is staffing,” he says. “It has been for probably about a six-month period. Once we brought everybody back, we continue to try to hire and, for various reasons, there’s been limited staffing available.”

Adriaansen adds that staffing has been a challenge for his company and others in the document destruction industry and more generally, as well. He says it’s limiting Titan’s ability to grow.

Sandy Palmier, who works in human relations, marketing and accounting at Gateway Recycling, agrees, suggesting that many people aren’t working as a result of more generous unemployment benefits brought on by the pandemic.

Gateway Recycling is a Cleveland-based recycling company that offers mobile and plant-based secure destruction services through its Gateway Confidential division. The company serves clients in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, West Virginia and Michigan.

Jim Dowse, chief operating officer at Time Shred Services, Freeport, New York, says the emergence of COVID-19 incentivized him to better market his company to potential and current customers by investing more heavily in updating and using the company’s website. He also reached out to potential customers through direct mail promotions.

“Our business has recovered nicely,” Dowse says. “And it’s recovered because we’ve spent a lot of time doing different marketing things to get our name out there. We became very aggressive from a marketing standpoint, and that has helped us rebound.”

Because 60 percent of Time Shred Services’ business comes from its website, changing tactics to a more marketing-centric approach has placed the company fiscally ahead in comparison with 2020 and 2019, Dowse says.

“Literally any type of business you can think of, we service with shredding,” he says. “Everybody needs shredding. It’s just a matter of when they need it.”

However, for Nate Segall of Toledo, Ohio-based AccuShred, business as usual didn’t change during the pandemic, though some minor pandemic-related policies and procedures were added to the company’s daily operations.

“We had to make some changes to the way we operate; some of our policies and procedures had to change,” Segall, president of AccuShred, says. “But, fortunately, we made them and were able to continue to operate almost the same. Whatever it took to service the customer, we did.”

He says AccuShred was able to effectively communicate with its customers via a newsletter as well as through other promotional items.

Gateway Confidential prioritized the safety of its employees and customers while maintaining its shredding schedule.

“It definitely wasn’t business as usual,” Palmier says. “But I think everybody just went on with their [business], as long as they took the precautions of masks and social distancing and wipes. Safety was obviously the first priority for everybody.”

Shredding service adaptations

“About 75 to 80 percent of our business is what we call routine service,” Adriaansen says. He adds that can mean either weekly, biweekly or monthly scheduled services. “We did have to go through a process with some of our accounts to modify the service and agreements on a temporary basis. We haven’t had to do anything … on a long-term basis.”

With the pandemic shifting typical service schedules, secure destruction service providers had to adapt as much as their customers did.

“When this all started, we all thought it was going to be two, four weeks,” Adriaansen says. “We’ve tried to be as flexible as possible because we understand that [customers] don’t have a crystal ball on what they’re going to be doing.”

Adriaansen adds that he doesn’t anticipate service schedules to be “relatively normal” until after Labor Day. At that point, he says, Titan Mobile Shredding plans to work with some of its accounts that have not returned to regular in-office schedules to “get them on a service level that works for them.”

AccuShred incorporated pandemic necessities, such as personal protective equipment (PPE) and social distancing, with minimal issues.

“You get the typical PPE type of changes. We sanitized the containers when we would deliver them,” Segall says. “We stopped taking walk-in customers during that time period. We have restarted that as of probably six months or so, but now we let them only enter the foyer to pay their bill rather than coming all the way into the office with respect to servicing the customers out of the office.”

Because many offices and businesses have switched to a hybrid or work-from-home schedule during the pandemic, Time Shred adjusted its shredding services to be more compatible with its customers’ newfound needs.

The company achieved this by promoting on-call services rather than scheduled pickups and by offering shredding services Monday through Saturday. These changes made its services more flexible and saved money for businesses that were contracted for scheduled shredding pickups before the pandemic.

“We don’t lock [customers] into a schedule with our contracts,” Dowse says. “We allowed them to make changes as necessary … And then as things pick up for them, they can always go back.

“So, we’ve always been flexible for our customers because we’re not trying to force our services on them. We want to meet their needs.”

Similarly, Gateway Confidential’s sales team worked to modify services to individually contracted customers though Zoom and phone calls, Palmier says.

Profitability takes a hit

Despite a trend of businesses going bankrupt or closing because of the pandemic, that has not been the case for these document destruction companies. Most of the sources contacted for this article say their businesses experienced a hiccup before quickly getting back to normal last year.

Dowse says March and April of 2020 were Time Shred’s worst months. “Business was down about 64 percent,” he says.

Dowse says Time Shred’s ability to provide information and timely service were big advantages during the pandemic. However, the company’s profitability was still affected.

Gateway Confidential also saw its profitability take a hit, with Palmier saying the decrease in shredding volume and the pandemic led to ripple effects companywide afterward.

“The pandemic impacted volume initially,” she says. “And now the aftermath is wage increases and trouble hiring, which affects the bottom line for profitability.”

Titan Mobile Shredding and AccuShred also saw their profitability decline in 2020. Despite this, the companies say they have gained skills that will pay dividends going forward.

Newfound adaptability

With many companies resurfacing and rebuilding as the pandemic subsides, shredding companies are seeing the lasting effects of the pandemic on their businesses, good and bad.

“We’ve become more adaptable to servicing our customers,” Adriaansen says. “It’s also made us review a lot of our service routes to try to make them as efficient as we can, and we will continue to do that as all of our accounts come back online. [COVID-19] forced us to review everything that we spend money on, and we had to change some of that a little bit [to be] more fiscally responsible. We’re certainly going to keep that going.”

The pandemic also led some companies to reconsider their service agreements with clients, reducing service frequencies.

“We came out of it pretty healthily from a numbers standpoint,” Segall says. “We’re still looking to grow as [the] economy starts to pick up. My one concern going forward is I think that change frequencies from some of our customers may not go back to where they were.”

Segall says flexible shredding schedules were born out of necessity during the pandemic, but having less frequent pickups can allow shredding companies to maintain a larger client base, with AccuShred steadily adding customers since the pandemic began.

Gateway Confidential took the time to evaluate and promote internal changes in the company’s structure, such as streamlining its operations to work more efficiently, Palmier says.

Time Shred Services also made pandemic-prompted changes, with an emphasis on its marketing strategy. “It made us more aggressive,” Dowse says. “So, we had to look for the business, and that’s helped us literally get through the pandemic and now exceed prepandemic levels. You had to adapt or perish.”

The author is a summer intern with the Recycling Today Media Group.

For five decades, Glen “Skip” Anthony has helped build, design, install and modify auto shredding plants in the United States and around the world. Anthony, who is currently vice president of recycling services with Illinois-based Sargent’s Equipment & Repair Service Inc., spent much of his career with St. Louis-based shredder manufacturer American Pulverizer.

In an episode of Recycling Today’s “The Scrap Show” podcast, Senior Editor Brian Taylor interviews Anthony about his career and the wider trends and changes he has witnessed (and taken part in) during his 50 years in the business. An edited excerpt from the conversation with Anthony follows.

Recycling Today (RT): In looking at the nature of how shredding plants have changed, what were some of the limitations to investing in and operating a shredding plant when you first came into the industry? How did that change over the years?

Skip Anthony (SA): Well, originally, it was mainly the larger operations that could justify putting in a shredder. And, the quantity of scrap available back then wasn’t like it is today. So, they had to have a bigger market to draw scrap from. Also, their primary concern then was to get clean ferrous scrap. The byproducts that are popular today weren’t as critical back then. So, volume meant a lot in order to produce enough material to make a profit.

RT: So, did that change the design or the size of shredder installations later in your career?

SA: It did. One of the things that was repeated in conversations all over the country was smaller to midsize operations wanting to be able to shred. As well, they could see an increase in their profit based on the recovery of other materials, and the best way to separate and recover materials is definitely to shred. Many operators had always baled and sheared, or maybe had a niche or brought material in, processed it minimally and passed it on to the larger operations with the big shredder. The push was: Can somebody come up with a smaller shredder that we can afford to put in and run at a much lower volume and still be profitable? And I think that’s what pushed the growth of other companies into shredder manufacturing, thus also allowing other [scrap processing] companies to get into shredding.

RT: Recycling Today tries to track the shredders that are out there in the U.S., and the shredder population has certainly increased.

SA: Well, that is one thing about this industry, it never sits still. There are a lot of entrepreneurial people in it that are willing to take risks to get to a different level to find a better way to do things. So, they constantly push the manufacturers to meet those needs, and they help to make their markets grow. With the advent of several different sized shredders and different types of shredders for different materials, some more specialized shredding came about because the midsize and smaller operations were wanting to grow and be able to enjoy some of the profits that they were not receiving before.

RT: Regarding shredder maintenance, I suspect now there is a much better body of knowledge of how to maintain a shredder and how to operate it. What are your observations on that?

What I’ve seen is a huge input into the training, the facilities, the tooling and the operations attitude to where [maintenance] is a constant part of the operation. If they maintain their equipment and do the things you do in any manufacturing process, it’s going to produce that [steel] scrap at the end of the line and the nonferrous on the other side.

RT: How has the downstream nonferrous part of the shredding process changed during your career?

SA: Well, it’s changed tremendously, and it continues to change. ... Originally, as I said, the primary goal was to clean ferrous material. Then, as eddy currents evolved, they now were able to get zorba products out of the mix. Initially, operators were happy with that, and then the commingled materials they would pick somewhat, with the rest of the material then ending up either going to another processor or to the landfill. At first, everybody went after the low-hanging fruit, but only a few dedicated companies went after hard-to-get materials.

Now, even small shredding operations in the 2,000 to 3,000 tons per month or so range are putting in equipment to try to recover every bit of material they possibly can. The return on investment on a system has increased markedly by having the ability to get these other products, and it has allowed smaller operators to be able to shred and recover material and be successful without having to have a major over-the-top investment to get there.

RT: It sounds like chasing that nonferrous and trying to wring every last bit out of it seems to usually pay off.

SA: It is amazing, because you have seen the size of the recovery plants that are being installed and the type of equipment. I mean, think back to eddy currents and the original sensor. Now you have machines that can do multiple separations. You can batch run and [undertake] multiple separations out of different materials.

RT: Downstream sorting just keeps evolving, not losing its importance.

SA: We’ve seen such a push in the automotive aluminum portion and the separation of materials using X-ray technology and optical color sorting. The materials now can be qualified for certain grades that allow it to be put into processes to make the higher quality alloys. It’s a constantly changing environment for recovering, and they keep bringing equipment in from different industries that we would have never thought of 25 years ago, from, say, the medical sector or the food industry.

Glen “Skip” Anthony is the vice president of recycling services at Illinois-based Sargent’s Equipment & Repair Service Inc. For more details, visit www.sargentsequipment.com.

Although prime scrap grades gained yet more value in the July buying period, the parade of obsolete scrap flowing into yards seems to have helped the supply of other ferrous scrap grades catch up with demand.

Fastmarkets AMM July export and Midwest Scrap Index pricing shows overseas buyers were unwilling to raise their bids for scrap from the U.S. Domestic buyers, meanwhile, had to pay yet another $20 per ton for prime, prompt scrap, but the prices for shredded and No. 1 heavy melting steel, or HMS, were flat.

While the July prices did not rise, the fact that they simply held their value for another 30 days seemingly put scrap processors in a good mood.

“It’s been a good 12 months and a fantastic first half of 2021,” says a scrap processor on the East Coast. “With very strong ferrous and nonferrous prices, we have been able to expand margins, and pre-COVID volumes are returning,” he adds.

“With very strong ferrous and nonferrous prices, we have been able to expand margins, and pre-COVID volumes are returning.” – an East Coast scrap processor

Although export prices might not be soaring, the ongoing overseas demand has its benefits, the processor says. “Strong container markets with prepaid and CAD [cash against documents via bank] terms have been great for cash flow to finance 30- to 45-day term shipments in the domestic market,” he says.

The processor says his company invested in its shredder downstream system two years ago, which has paid off nicely, along with the zorba price “going up 150 percent from pre-COVID,” he adds. “We are feeling good about the coming year and beyond.”

The high-priced ferrous scrap market continues to be linked to national and global demand for finished steel. Weekly steel production figures from the Washington-based American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) demonstrate a rebound from darker COVID-affected days last year.

Year-to-date domestic steel output through July 10 stands at more than 48.7 million tons, with a mill capability utilization (capacity) rate of 79.2 percent. That is up 16.7 percent from the 41.7 million tons made during the same period last year, when the capacity rate was 66.7 percent, AISI reports.

Globally through the month of May, crude steel production for the 64 countries reporting to the Brussels-based World Steel Association checked in at 837.5 million metric tons. That represents a 14.5 percent increase over the amount of steel produced through May of 2020.

 

Global output in the month of May rose 16.5 percent compared with May 2020. Steel production in Europe, the Americas and Africa increased by 33 percent to 65 percent compared with May 2020, when restrictions in many nations were at their most stringent points.

Through May, steelmakers in Turkey have produced 21.2 percent more steel than they did in the first five months of 2020, while steelmakers in India have churned out 33.6 percent more product. The two nations provide steady export markets for American ferrous scrap processors.

Securing supply, making shipping arrangements and managing risk remain management tasks for processors and traders who may otherwise be pleased with the buoyant market.

In terms of supply securement, Peru-based electric arc furnace (EAF) steelmaker Aceros Arequipa made a move in July to tap into the U.S. scrap market to supply its mill in South America.

Aceros Arequipa announced it has agreed to purchase an auto shredder yard in Florida formerly operated by Topsham, Maine-based Grimmel Industries. The Peruvian steelmaker also will acquire a second Grimmel yard in St. Petersburg, Florida, as part of the transaction.

The firm’s announcement states in part, “Among the main assets acquired are two 116,000-square-meter (1.25 million-square-foot) yards, a 6,000-horsepower and 450 rpm shredder, as well as a magnetic metal separator that will allow the segregation of nonferrous material for export mainly to Asia.”

The EAF steelmaker says it expects to supply itself with 100,000 tons of ferrous scrap per year from the Florida operations, “reinforcing the supply of recycled steel” for its upgraded EAF melt shop in Pisco, Peru.

Freight woes and hedging were discussed at a ferrous scrap roundtable in late June during the International Recycling Week online event.

While soaring freight rates have been the topic of frequent complaints in late 2020 and into 2021, Ved Prakash of Belgium-based secondary commodities trading firm Gemini Corp. said the global rise in sea freight rates has not imposed an undue burden on Gemini, even though it ships some 130,000 containers each year.

“The logistic cost percentage of [a transaction] price is usually around 20 percent,” he said. Despite the rising freight rates, that margin “is still the same” as of mid-2021, he said, since scrap prices also have moved up.