Reaching the summit

The family business GDE Recyclage (Guy Dauphin Environnement), headquartered in Rocquancourt in the Normandy region of France, describes itself on its website as “No. 2 in France.”

That No. 1 spot is likely occupied by recycler Derichebourg, a French company with some 54 shredders located throughout France.

However, GDE, as the so-called No. 2 recycler, is certainly one to watch, with an impressive track record and significant investments of late, even in the face of challenging economic conditions.

The recycling company now employs 1,470 team members across 75 locations in France, and its recycling operations give rise to the sale of some 3 million tonnes of secondary commodities per year, with annual revenue in the plus-€1 billion range. And in recent years the company has invested millions on a new multibuilding recycling and recovery campus in Rocquancourt.

The ferrous and nonferrous metals and plastics GDE sells are handled at its eight main processing locations in France, including its five shredders and three post-processing plants. GDE also has more than 75 collection sites in France. In the European Union, where recycling and recovery targets for end-of-life vehicles have been set at 95% this year, GDE appears to be on track with what is often described as a challenging target and is moving forward with its sights set higher.
 

Growth strategies

Founded in 1965 by French entrepreneur Guy Dauphin, GDE has remained a family owned company since then, explains Olivier Pitavy, development project manager for parent company, ECORE B.V.

ECORE B.V., based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, was created in 1978, following significant business growth for GDE, and now holds numerous recycling subsidiaries acquired over the years, including its French subsidiary GDE. Others include Ereco in Hungary, Romrecycling in Romania, Loca in Switzerland and ECORE of Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands. GDE, which operates more than 80% of ECORE’s European production sites, is the main contributor to the group’s activity, the company reports. And during the last decade, GDE invested in state-of-the-art processing equipment that is unique in Europe, Pitavy says, representing around €1 billion since 2000. These investments, he adds, “enabled the group to handle ever-increasing tonnages, which makes GDE the second-largest recycling group in France today.”

GDE now operates five shredders in France, including three 6000-horsepower shredders (the most powerful in France, Pitavy says), and has invested more than €600 million over the last 10 years in equipment capable of earning the European Union’s Best Available Technologies (BAT) for metal processing.

In Rocquancourt, GDE also operates what Pitavy says is one of the most efficient European plants for recycling lead acid batteries, with a recovery rate in excess of 95%. The company has been involved in this sector for some 20 years, Pitavy says, having completed a replacement of its crushing/separation line and water treatment unit in 2008.

Over the last two decades, Pitavy explains, GDE has worked to refine processes for recycling shredder residues using the EU’s BATs for ferrous and nonferrous metal processing. This activity began with a flotation process conventionally used in mining, but has increased in complexity over the last several years. Lately the company has been studying the recycling and recovery of both heavy and light shredder residues, with the construction of a multibuilding recycling campus at its headquarters in Rocquancourt.

The company’s research and development programs led to a €25 million investment in late 2011 dedicated to the heavy fraction, when the company replaced its heavy media plant with a dry process, resulting in lower operating costs, improved wire and metal recovery and better quality of metals, Pitavy says.

A related project in Rocquancourt is now in its final phase. With an estimated cost of €38 million, it is designed to significantly increase recovery rates for all scrap that GDE shreds, including end-of-life vehicles, obsolete electronics (WEEE), and both heavy and light scrap.

“The innovative recovery system that was developed holds true to the corporate tagline ‘Material Reborn,’ as previously unrecoverable material will now be used again in reborn goods,” Pitavy says. He says the company is creating synergies between existing technologies and the newest ones.

The effort also includes refining GDE’s processes in creating solid recovered fuel (SRF) from some shredder fractions. The company has established partnerships with various industries, including the cement industry, as it works to develop ecologically friendly alternatives to their current fuel needs.

“We are now able to provide other kinds of SRF with high energetic value,” Pitavy comments. “The specifications of consuming plants are very demanding, and GDE works in an industrial partnership to provide high-quality products.”
 

Rocquancourt upgrades

GDE’s Rocquancourt location, the birthplace of the company, remains a key innovation centre for GDE and the ECORE Group as a whole, Pitavy says. The site includes numerous facilities on more than 37 hectares (about 60 acres) dedicated to recycling and research.

In 2014, the company completed a number of upgrades to postshredder processing techniques and equipment in Rocquancourt. Even so, Pitavy says the cutting edge postshredder systems now in place in Rocquancourt represent “only a first phase,” for GDE. He explains that specifically for shredder residue, the company currently uses the following techniques in Rocquancourt:

• several kinds of screening devices including a media flotation plant that incorporates years of experience and development at GDE;
• traditional sorting equipment such as magnetic drums, overhead magnets, eddy currents, metal sensors and additional equipment that has been modified over the years;
• more advanced technologies that have recently come to the market.
   

Pitavy says the company worked with several manufacturers to test processed shredder residue with respect to industrial consumers’ specifications for various grades of material.

“The tests were used to validate the choice of tools [and] also the order in which they should be used,” he explains. “Indeed, all the innovation of the project lies in both the choice of existing equipment but also the manner in which it needs to be used.”

For example, says Pitavy, it is commonly believed that size reduction of shredded materials helps facilitate easier sorting. The company’s research shows this to be even more important for the light fraction containing wires, foams, textiles and an abundance of material that is tangled or mixed together.

“The tests we performed showed this size reduction before sorting was a condition for success,” Pitavy says. In addition, GDE researchers found that for some critical separation stages, “we had not only to transfer existing technologies from other sectors but also to adapt and improve them for our specific materials.” The research resulted in the addition of new equipment around existing core processes, he says.

Pitavy says the recent installations include sensor-based equipment, plastic recycling equipment, wet processes, dry processes and technologies to increase the density of the final products.

The major end products produced at GDE’s postshredding plants include traditional ferrous and nonferrous grades, including zorba and zurik, insulated aluminium and copper wire suitable for upgrading, printed circuit boards, mixed aluminium, mixed stainless, polypropylene (PP) and polyethylene (PE) plastic fractions and SRFs.

Pitavy says the major challenge of this type of investment is meeting both economic and regulatory aspects. “Producing a stable product is a key for success,” he explains.
 

Changing ASR streams

With the increased efficiency of post-shredder technology, the amount of recovered metals has increased, Pitavy observes, even as the proportion of metals has decreased, because newer ELVs tend to contain more plastic and less metal.

He points out that in Europe, the quantity of metal in a 2005 model car (today’s typical ELV) averaged 5.8% more by weight. Secondly, he says in most cases GDE shredders are not dedicated only to ELVs but also to electronic scrap, large appliances and scrap from disposal centers.

“The quantity of metal recovered (from ASR) depends a lot on the input scrap,” says Pitavy.

When recycling plastics from ASR, Pitavy says the main challenge is that shredded plastics are very heterogeneous. While the company has for years recycled clean production scrap from plastics manufacturers, Pitavy says a year ago GDE also began recycling such items as car bumpers, oil tanks and other related products.

“The challenge was to clean these products,” he says, explaining that the company built a complete granulating and washing line to process significant volumes of plastics.

“Resins commonly used in automotive and electronic goods are mutually incompatible,” he says, referring to the resulting mixture of high-density polyethylene (HDPE), acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), PP and polyvinyl chloride (PVC).

Furthermore, Pitavy says, extracting plastics from the heterogeneous stream is difficult. He says GDE was initially focused on the recycling of a PE/PP fraction and now plans to separate a PS/ABS fraction as well.

“We have the capability to recover part of the plastics contained in the shredder residue,” he says. These plastics are dirty and need to be sorted from a mix of foam, textiles, rubber and wood. “This is the final and most difficult part of our 2014 investments, but more than 80% of the volume will come from this secured and sustainable stream of ASR plastics.” Pitavy says it is possible to recycle any portion of recovered plastics into new plastics, provided recyclers have enough pure plastic to mix with and depending on the price.

“The choice we made at GDE is not to depend on other sources to make a project viable. We want to produce a directly marketable finished product. This means we produce high-quality plastics that can be reused directly as a secondary raw plastic material.”

This requires a high level of quality control, Pitavy adds, because unlike metals streams, the sale of recovered plastics does not allow much leeway for lowered prices based on quality deviations.

“We have set up a stable network of customers who trust our plastic products after using them for several months. We are now talking about more than 2,000 metric tons of recycled plastics per month,” he says.

Furthermore, Pitavy says further improvements will result from improving the value of final products, such as wire containing copper; continuing to pursue a zero-waste goal; and adapting processes for new sources of material such as incinerator ash and future ELVs.

Concerning ELVs, he says, the company’s recent investments in processing postshredder residues are designed to ensure GDE achieves the 95% reuse and recovery target for 2015.

“We are now in a position to prove this is feasible at an industrial scale and in a sustainable manner,” he says. “We believe very few companies can do it at the moment because the investment and technological know-how needed are really impressive.”
 

Moving forward

Pitavy says recycling, in particular, requires foresight and planning as part of product design.

“We must now consider recycling of products to be put on the market,” he says. “This is the case for cars that reach their end of life in 10 or 15 years. Recycling should be part of the overall design; this is why we have to work with car manufacturers. Vehicles today always include less metal, but use other materials that will be recycled.”

Furthermore, he says recycling processes must continue to be scrutinized to higher and higher standards.

With regard to today’s postshredder technologies, Pitavy says GDE will continue to monitor environmental concerns as well as increasing regulatory requirements for recycling and recovery.

“This forces—and it is a good thing—our sector to professionalise and invest,” he says. “There are a lot of available technologies and possibilities to process shredder residue. Equipment can be combined in many different ways.” Therefore, he adds, it can be difficult to decide which way to go.

Pitavy and his colleagues at GDE often base such decisions on advanced mathematical modelling techniques.

“For each possibility we compute a scenario taking into account investment amounts, sales prices, recovery rates, production costs, disposal costs and all known parameters,” he says.

Ultimately, Pitavy observes, this method may help pinpoint a conclusion but it is not necessarily the only way.

“Experience remains important. Sometimes you ‘feel’ a new machine will solve a problem and help you to move forward. That is why it is important to never stop testing and [to keep] watching what’s going on outside your organisation.”

The author is managing editor of Recycling Today Global Edition and can be contacted at lmckenna@gie.net.