Bermco Aluminum completes upgrade

Bermco Aluminum, a Birmingham, Alabama, secondary aluminum producer, has completed a $5 million investment at its melt shop. The upgrade includes work on two of the company’s 220,000-pound furnaces, one of which began operating earlier in 2014.

Bob Hollabaugh of Bermco’s sales department says the company realized it had to increase its capacity to compete in the growing secondary aluminum sector. To accomplish this, Bermco opened a 220,000-pound furnace in early 2014 and a second furnace that began operating in the late summer of 2014.

The company now has the two new reverberatory furnaces and one rotary furnace. Two new casting and cooling lines also were part of the investment, along with a robotic ingot stacker. Hollabaugh says an additional investment that Bermco is proud of is a “state-of-the-art pollution control system.”

The investments have made Bermco’s operations more energy efficient as well as boosted capacity at the facility, he comments.

“The primary motivation for us is that we needed to upgrade. Our customers were hungry and we have proven that we have a reliable system in place,” says Hollabaugh.