BossTek, Peoria, Illinois, has introduced an optional variable frequency drive (VFD) system to its lineup of dust-suppression equipment that allows users to adjust airflow to suit a broader range of applications and working environments. The company says the VFD system reduces the need to purchase or rent different models to match output to specific project requirements, delivering greater flexibility and reducing the total cost of equipment ownership.
“Atomized mist technology has been widely accepted as an extremely effective approach to dust management,” BossTek Sales Manager Mike Lewis says. “This new development will allow users to tailor the fan speed to match the job. Project managers may need the wide coverage and long reach of our larger models on some jobs, but the volume and throw distance may be too much for smaller projects, such as those in crowded downtown locations. Instead of using a smaller machine to accommodate their changing needs, now they can simply dial back the airflow to match the requirements of those smaller projects,” he adds.
Lewis says the VFD is likely to assist companies with variable needs, including transfer stations and indoor applications.
The VFD control is available via a dial or remote control on three of the company’s DustBoss models: the DB-30, DB-45 and DB-60. All three use specialized nozzles and a ducted fan design to atomize the water flow into droplets 50 to 200 microns in size. According to the company, being able to match the droplet size to the most common particle sizes delivers the greatest opportunity for them to collide and fall to the ground.
The company says the VFD modular design facilitates installation and configuration, with communications options that include a dual-port EtherNet/IP card for networking flexibility. An LCD human interface module supports multiple languages and features scrolling text to explain parameters and codes. Flexible motor control options include volts per hertz, sensorless vector control and economizer mode to suit a variety of applications.
FleetMind names inaugural winner of its Public Safety Heroes campaign
FleetMind, Montreal, has recognized Kyle Schmidt from the city of Dickinson, North Dakota, as its first annual 2019 Public Safety Hero Campaign Grand Prize Winner. The Public Safety Heroes Campaign, which ran from June to September of last year, offered waste and recycling fleet managers the opportunity to recognize and nominate their safest drivers to compete for the title of 2019 Public Safety Hero and a chance to win a $1,000 cash prize.
“Mr. Schmidt stood out from the rest of this year’s nominees as the best example of safe driving behavior,” FleetMind Regional Account Director Frank Flores says. “I was extremely excited to present the award to Mr. Schmidt … in recognition of his stellar driving record and commitment to safety.”
FleetMind says its FleetLink driver behavior software that can be used to generate back office reports that detect aggressive driving behavior, speeding, hard braking, accidents and more, played a prominent role in the submission process.
According to the company, Dickinson’s fleet manager used the FleetLink back-office software to extract and submit Schmidt’s driver’s scorecard and his performance report as proof of his safety track record. Other nominees sent in FleetLink camera system recordings of drivers using quick judgment to avoid collisions and dashboards and reports showcasing some of their safest drivers.
The dividend, calculated on the purchases a member or associate made at the cooperative, further reduces the purchase price of supplies and equipment, NASCO-OP Manager Bob Bedard says.
“In today’s increasingly competitive marketplace, the need for NASCO-OP is greater now than ever before,” he says. “Cooperatives give members and users of all sizes the purchasing clout of an entire industry while still maintaining their independence,” Bedard adds.
Voith opens facility in Houston
Voith, with U.S. offices in York, Pennsylvania, opened a new facility last fall in Houston. According to Voith, the 32,000-square-foot facility is focused on performing gearbox repair, retrofits and overhauls, servicing Voith and non-Voith products.
The company hosted an open house in mid-November of last year for customers and vendors to learn more about the site’s gearbox workshop. Event attendees had the opportunity to experience Voith’s Asset Performance Management integrated through augmented reality (AR) via a demonstration of the VoreconNX variable speed drive. Guests saw firsthand how AR can be used to access information such as technical documents and video training guides.
The Voith Group, based in Germany, is a global technology company with a portfolio of systems, products, services and digital applications. It also offers shredders, presses and conveyors for the recycling industry.
33rd Southeast Recycling Conference & Trade Show, Miramar Beach, Florida, Southern Waste Information eXchange Inc., http://southeastrecycling.com
March 22-25
35th International Conference on Solid Waste Technology and Management, Annapolis, Maryland, The Journal of Solid Waste Technology and Management, http://solid-waste.org/2020-agenda
March 23-24
3rd Steel & Raw Material Conference, Chittagong, Bangladesh, SteelMint, http://bit.ly/steelmint
From a young age, Jennifer Jones knew she wanted to someday join her mother, Sheila Jones, and work for Scrap Central Inc., Sheila’s scrap metal recycling business in Omaha, Nebraska. Sheila started the business in 2001, and Jennifer says she can remember being about 10 years old helping her mother by weighing can customers on Saturday afternoons at the scrap yard.
“I grew up around the business,” Jennifer says. “I basically fell in love with the business from day one. The joke in the industry is that you get bit by the scrap bug, and I definitely was bit and wanted to keep learning and growing.”
After receiving a bachelor’s degree in environmental science from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln in 2010, Jennifer started to work full time at Scrap Central, helping to lead the business alongside her mother. In 2011, about six months after Jennifer started working there full time, Sheila died of cancer, and Jennifer decided to step up as CEO of the company.
“It was tough,” she says of that time. “I had only six months to work with [my mother] after I graduated college. After she passed away, I struggled every day for six months. I’d have to come to work, put on a tough face, come home at night and cry and then get up the next morning to do the same thing. Eventually, I went into a fight-or-flight mode, and I was just determined to succeed and make my parents proud. I focused all my time and energy into the business, which I think allowed us to really expand and grow.”
Since becoming CEO in 2011, Jennifer says Scrap Central has grown. In 2014, the company moved from a 0.5-acre site to a 7-acre site in Omaha. Today, Scrap Central employs 36 people and is focused on growing its industrial and commercial business as well as its wire chopping business.
Recycling Today (RT): What are some new things that happened at the business in 2019?
Jennifer Jones (JJ): 2019 was a really exciting year for us. Not only did we grow our volumes year over year, but we also added a lot of new equipment ... because we took over servicing one of the largest steel manufacturers in the Midwest. We purchased a new semitrailer, added four open-top scrap trailers and another crane to our equipment fleet.
“My mom always taught me from a young age that in this industry, you move with the markets.”
RT: Last year, the scrap industry experienced challenging market conditions. How did Scrap Central work through the tough market conditions?
JJ: Despite the downturn in the markets, we were still doing really well in my opinion.
My mom always taught me from a young age that in this industry, you move with the markets. What gets a lot of people in trouble is greed—they hold, hold, hold, thinking it goes up; but, as a matter of fact, it can go down just as easy as it can go up.
We also try to be ahead of the trends and have diversified into several different recycling streams.
RT: What new technologies do you hope the industry will embrace?
JJ: I’d love to see the industry move toward more green, environmentally friendly equipment. We’re seeing some electric cranes come out and some heavy-duty equipment with lower emissions.
Down the line, I’d love to see alternative energy sources, such as solar panels, help to power our facility—especially since our [MTB] Cable Box [wire chopping system] requires so much electricity.
The solar panels right now are cost prohibitive for us; but, down the line, if they were to become less expensive and if we felt they could supply enough power, we would think about investing in them.
Miss a semester, miss a lot
Columns - Editor’s Letter
The second half of 2019 was full of changes in the recycling industry. This year also will likely be full of change.
After more than two decades on Recycling Today’s editorial staff, in the second half of 2019, I took advantage of a sabbatical benefit offered by our parent company, GIE Media Inc., and unplugged from my full-time schedule for several months.
It is perhaps a cliché to call the break an opportunity to “recharge my batteries,” but in many ways it is an accurate portrayal of the adult equivalent of skipping a semester.
During the sabbatical I did not completely unplug from the recycling industry, attending four industry conferences in four different countries and attempting to keep in touch with email correspondence (while not being overwhelmed by it).
Maintaining some level of industry involvement seemed necessary, considering the pace of change in the recycling sector, the wider economy and in the adoption of policies that affect recyclers.
The second half of 2019 proved up to the task of generating volatile conditions and new circumstances, setting the table for a new year that is just as likely to yield changes.
The government of China did not drastically divert from its late decade aversion to importing scrap from other countries. However, at a November 2019 meeting in that country, the China Nonferrous Metals Industry Association (CMRA) Recycling Metal Branch announced that change could be at hand.
According to the group, and to subsequent reports, pertinent Chinese ministries have agreed to classify some grades of nonferrous scrap as a resource. This would, ideally, eliminate cumbersome and restrictive quotas that have hampered aluminum and red metal scrap trade between China and scrap exporting nations.
“Maintaining some level of industry involvement seemed necessary, considering the pace of change in the recycling sector.”
Ferrous scrap recyclers in the United States saw appreciable buying interest from nations throughout Asia in 2019, and domestic demand was stable through much of the year.
Nonetheless, those seemingly positive conditions were not enough to prevent dramatic ferrous scrap price drops in the fall of 2019, creating one of those swoons that can damage the bottom lines of metals recycling firms.
Environmental advocates have continued to heap scorn on plastic, spurring numerous investments in emerging recycling methods.
Paper and board markets could benefit from packaging switches to those materials, but scrap paper prices reflected no such thing in 2019.
As Recycling Today’s staff prepares to talk to our readers at numerous 2020 industry events, we’ll be as eager as ever to hear how the changes are affecting you and what you’re doing to manage through change.
Off to a good start
Features - Copper Commodity Focus
Copper started 2020 with renewed strength, though sources say they are cautiously optimistic about the red metal’s prospects for the year.
Copper scrap markets started the year by showing renewed strength, though some industry contacts say they fear that strength may be short-lived given that geopolitical forces have had more influence on the market in recent years.
Sources attribute the boost in generation and pricing in part to the uptick in ferrous scrap prices seen in recent months and to renewed interest from overseas buyers.
“Ferrous has been up for three months,” says Randy Goodman with the Roswell, Georgia-based brokerage firm Greenland (America) Inc. “This gives nonferrous a bit of a boost because a lot of the people selling ferrous are selling nonferrous,” he adds.
Of copper scrap markets, Goodman says, “November was horrible, and December was not good. But January seems to be a starting out a little bit better; there seems to be a little more bounce in everyone’s step.”
He says stable copper pricing in the $2.80 range has brought some trading back to that market.
A nonferrous trader for a scrap processing company based in the Midwest says generation is “decent but not great,” adding that buying material was difficult when COMEX pricing dropped to the $2.60 per pound range toward the end of last summer. COMEX copper pricing increased to the $2.80 per pound range initially on the news of the U.S. and China reaching an agreement on Phase One of a trade agreement in December of last year. The trader says that if COMEX pricing stays near the $2.80 level, as it has for the first couple of weeks of January, it could help to bring out additional copper scrap. However, he adds, “Some people are always waiting for the next big move.”
Getting a boost from exports
The Midwest-based trader characterizes supply and demand for copper as being in “pretty good balance,” adding that the export market has helped to pull some No. 1 and No. 2 material out of the U.S. that normally stays within the country.
A trader based in the Southwest agrees with this assessment. His company is exporting copper scrap, particularly in the form of birch/cliff (No. 2 copper wire/No. 2 copper solids and tubing) to countries in Southeast Asia, Asia and Europe, he says. “They are buying at a very healthy spread, which tells you that even with the tariff there is just good demand,” he says of buyers for Chinese consumers in particular.
He says these buyers are buying material with the highest copper content they can in light of the tariffs China is assessing on copper scrap shipments from the U.S.
“If you look at brass, export is really depressed because the tariff is too taxing,” he adds.
While export demand is off compared with the years when China dominated buying, Todd Safran of Safran Metals Inc., a nonferrous scrap processing company based in Chicago, says it has been increasing for the last couple of months. “I won’t say it’s setting the world on fire, but I am seeing it come back to life a little.”
The anticipation of more copper scrap consumption in China this year also is affecting pricing, Goodman says. “I think they are going to use more and more scrap again as they continue to sort out how they are going to categorize it,” he says. “Copper is already flowing in that direction because it can and because the markets make sense. But once they do reclassify it, I think it will be somewhat of a spigot turning back on.”
The Chinese central government has announced that as of the second quarter of this year, high-grade copper and aluminum scrap that meets new purity standards will no longer be classed as waste and can be imported into the country in unlimited amounts, rather than through the quota system that has been in place. (See the sidebar on page 44 for more information.)
David Chiao of Atlanta-based Uni-All Group Ltd. and president of the Brussels-based Bureau of International Recycling (BIR) Nonferrous Metals Division, says the quotas the Chinese government issued for nonferrous metals imports in the first quarter are “surprisingly generous.”
The country permitted an additional 26,566 metric tons of copper scrap and 7,544 metric tons of aluminum scrap to enter China in the first quarter of the year in a second batch of quotas issued in early January. The first batch of quotas for the quarter was announced in late December 2019. In that batch, nearly 271,000 metric tons of high-grade copper scrap and nearly 275,500 metric tons of aluminum scrap quotas were issued.
Chiao adds that “some consumers think it may be a gesture of the U.S.-China trade war standing down or maybe Beijing just beginning to realize the importance of scrap.”
Despite the unexpectedly generous quotas from China, Safran says U.S. scrap processors must “get as creative as possible and forge new relationships” to keep material moving.
“If you have a great product and great relationships, you’re going to be able to find good homes” for material, he says.
Improved flow
“Flows are picking up across the board,” the trader based in the Southwest says of nonferrous scrap. He attributes that to the “excitement” created by the increase in ferrous scrap pricing, which helps to bring nonferrous scrap into the yards.
“There is an increase in quoting as well as flows,” the Southwest-based source says. “It’s changed a little compared with the fourth quarter. Things were relatively slow in generation as well as in consumption.”
Copper has benefited more from the uptick, he says. “Relative to aluminum, copper is in a better position with better balance in the domestic market. Aluminum is still pretty out of balance.”
His company primarily handles postindustrial scrap as well as material from other scrap dealers in the region.
“Demand is slightly better, depending on the commodity,” the trader based in the Midwest says. His company has scrap processing operations throughout that region. “Export is much better,” he says, “and prices have bounced off their lows for most nonferrous commodities.”
However, the Midwest-based trader adds, “Spreads for bare bright No. 2 are wider than based on the available material. I think that will change as consumers get back into the swing of things.”
A copper scrap processor who wants to remain anonymous says that while demand has picked up somewhat, domestic consumers are still measured in terms of their buying and will be for the next few months. “They are not aggressive in their purchasing yet. Demand is still slow in terms of what their needs are for 2020.”
He adds, “Pricing has stabilized, but spreads are still fairly wide in that it is a buyer’s market.”
Despite the recent pickup in the copper scrap sector, Safran says, “Things aren’t getting any easier, but you have to continue to find your niche and ride out this roller coaster.”
Cautious optimism
Most of the sources contacted for this article say they are “cautiously optimistic” about the outlook for copper scrap in the year ahead.
Regarding the tentative optimism he was feeling in early January, the trader based in the Midwest says it could “go away in the blink of an eye” because of the lack of visibility that characterizes the business today and the geopolitical forces that have been shaping the nonferrous scrap sector, including tariffs and trade wars and the potential for actual war in the Middle East.
“I think [China is] going to use more and more scrap again as they continue to sort out how they are going to categorize it. Copper is already flowing in that direction because it can and because the markets make sense. But once they do reclassify it, I think it will be somewhat of a spigot turning back on.” – Randy Goodman of Greenland (America) Inc.
“I’m still undecided on copper,” the trader in the Southwest says. “It can go either way, and a lot could be driven by geopolitical stuff.”
Safran says he thinks the first quarter of the year will offer more of the same, though he is hoping for increased activity in March and April. “We need to give it a few months for the system to flush itself out,” he says. “I think there will be a better outlook for the next three quarters of the year.
“Things are happening to the positive,” he adds.
“There is a brighter path ahead,” the Southwest-based trader says. “We are not out of it yet, but there is excitement, movement and flow.
“I don’t think we are over the hump,” he continues. “It still is a difficult marketplace, but it is a little better than in the fourth quarter.”
The author is editor of Recycling Today and can be contacted at dtoto@gie.net.
Brian Taylor
DeAnne Toto
