Eriez leverages its experience in mining and customer input to advance sorting and recycling

Equipment and technology provider Eriez has established itself as one of the metals recycling industry’s foremost innovators, with the company demonstrating a decadeslong commitment to introducing new or upgraded machinery to boost the profits of recycled metal processors.

Senior Sales Director – Eriez USA Darrell Milton says the company fosters and rewards innovation for several reasons, including a willingness to collaborate with customers and draw inspiration from beyond current metal recycling practices.

“We have been fortunate to have built strong relationships with our customers not only due to our equipment and application knowledge but also our knowledge of the entire recycling process,” Milton says regarding the Eriez approach.

He says customer interaction underlies the company’s considerable research and development (R&D) spending and effort.

“The rewards we all see are customers who partner with us, allowing both of us to benefit from the efforts of our R&D team,” Milton says.

“Being a global company, Eriez is able to understand how the global recycling landscape changes from continent to continent.” – Darrell Milton, senior sales director – Eriez USA

Specifically, such joint efforts have led to the development of the Eriez Shred-1 ballistic separator, P-Rex scrap drums, ultra-high frequency eddy current separators, hybrid magnetic wet drums and its Metal Loss Monitor, among other products.

Recyclers know Eriez as an equipment provider, but the company also has a global presence in the mining and food processing industries, two sectors that also rely on magnetic equipment for crucial process or quality control aspects.

“Eriez has always felt that there are many parallels between the mining and metals recycling sector,” Milton says. “Both industries liberate the material, then we physically separate materials from each other.”

The mining industry has used a grade recovery curve to determine the performance of its processes long before the first metal shredding and recycling system was created.

“Although the recycling industry operates under this mindset to a certain degree, we do feel there is room for improvement,” Milton says of the much younger industry sector.

To help the recycling industry catch up and even surpass the sorting and separating processes used in the mining sector, Milton says Eriez remains focused on collaboration and R&D to continue a tradition of innovation that traces back to its creation of the first commercial eddy current separator (ECS) in 1969.

“When the ECS was developed by Eriez in 1969, the company was in a forward-thinking mindset, understanding that this unique technology could prove to fill a gap recognized in current metal separation processes,” he says.