Political Noise Dies as Metal Shredder Does Its Job

(This article originally appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. To access the article, click here -- Minneapolis Star Tribune)

It's been a year now since Northern Metal Recycling started the long-fought-for shredder -- though a different brand than Kondirator -- just below the Lowry Avenue Bridge. The machine makes a racket, as predicted, as it hammers steel into pieces more suited for recycling.

But what's remarkable is how little noise the shredder makes these days at City Hall.

"If people have had complaints, they haven't been calling my office," said Diane Hofstede, the area's City Council member. Ditto for the office of the Hawthorne neighborhood group.

State Rep. Phyllis Kahn, DFL-Minneapolis, once a diehard opponent of a riverfront shredder, said: "I didn't even know it had begun operating."

That might be considered a surprising outcome for a battle that included lawsuits, involvement by the Legislature and an $8.75 million settlement paid by the city to the owner for lost profits.

It's not that some residents don't have complaints. But their concerns appear less about the shredder itself than about other operations in the scrap yard that have been going on to some degree for decades.

Scrap yard's long history

Calling the operation once known as American Iron and Supply a scrap yard, while accurate, belies the investment of tens of millions of dollars that a British-owned firm (Northern Metal Recycling's parent-company, European Metal Recycling) has made there. It bought the business in 2007 from the Isaacs family, which owned it for four generations since 1885, and moved it to its current site in 1952.

Besides installing the five-story shredder, the new company also hauled out truckloads of polluted soil, installed a sophisticated system to collect and filter rain and snowmelt and covered the 12-acre site with a foot-thick layer of concrete.

It replaced its barge dock and added expensive scrap-handling vehicles. The shredder has several levels of dust control, with a powerful air-handling system that runs dust through water and then through a filter.

"We have the latest technology, and as far as I understand, the most sophisticated duplicative pollution control that's available in the market today," said Stephen Ettinger, president of owner Northern Metal Recycling.

The scrap yard first weeds out hazardous materials. Then it sorts and grades metals to direct them to the best end user, whether that's a local foundry or steel mills downriver or in places such as China. The north Minneapolis operation is Northern Metal Recycling's main base, though it owns three other scrap companies in the region.

American Iron originally sought the shredder because mills pay more for shredded scrap. In 1989, the company put down a deposit on the Kondirator. As the company persevered despite repeated roadblocks, its settlement with the city required it to install a different brand of shredder enclosed in a building.

The company ultimately chose a 4,000-horsepower American machine, the Metso Texas Shredder. It rips up steel by flailing at it with manganese-hardened hammer-like metal arms.

The cacophony is partially contained by the machine and its building and can be drowned out by operations elsewhere on the scrap yard. Twin cranes that together cost $1 million roar as they bull scrap into piles, and a powerful shear bisects large pieces. The tinkling of pulverized steel falling from a conveyor sounds delicate by contrast.

The noise disturbs some neighbors a few hundred yards across the river. It's not so much the shredding as the associated noise. Resident John Holmberg cited an air-handling system "that sounds like a jet plane." After city environmental monitors intervened, the company agreed to limit blower hours. Similarly, after complaints about the periodic "boom!" from scrap dropped into barges, the company agreed to drop it from a lower height.

"There's still some concern about all the dust that gets generated," said Chris Gams, a staffer for the Bottineau Neighborhood Association. "You can see it on tabletops on a regular basis," said Tim Kremer, the association's chairman. "We would love for that to be a more wet process."

Despite dust-suppression sprinkling in the yard, it's easy to see puffs of dust as scrap is piled. Residents say they've watched as scrap dropped into barges sends distinct clouds of it over the river.

Isabel Harder said the yard's operations seem to have intensified with the shredder's startup. The shredder has a design capacity of 100 tons per day -- the permitted limit -- and Ettinger said the company plans to grow its business now that the industry is bouncing back from its 2008 recession. Minneapolis Star Tribune