Lane Added to Upstate Shredding Staff

Adam Weitsman, president of Upstate Shredding LLC, Owego, N.Y., has announced that Kris Lane has joined his company as general manager of nonferrous operations.

According to a news release from Upstate Shredding, “Nonferrous operations include the acquisition, processing and recovery of metals other than iron and alloys without appreciable amounts of iron, such as aluminum, copper, zinc and brass.”

Before joining Upstate, Lane was joint product manager for Schnitzer Steel Industries at the company’s Everett, Mass., port facility. There, he managed daily operations and technology upgrades for a plant that produced up to 4.5 million pounds of nonferrous metals per month, primarily for international export.

“Kris’ 12 years experience in the scrap metal business, with career emphasis in technologies increasing nonferrous yields, and his portside export experience is a rare combination,” says Weitsman. “With Kris’s leadership strengths, we’re confident we can turn our nonferrous export team into one of the strongest in the industry.”

Prior to working at Schnitzer, Lane was operations manager for NFR Northeast in Auburn, N.Y., and continued there in that position when it was acquired by the Reserve Management Group in 2003. While at NFR, Lane worked with engineers and technology partners to design and build a heavy media plant employing eddy current technologies.

Upstate Shredding, with locations in Owego, Binghamton, Ithaca and Syracuse, N.Y., bills itself as the largest privately owned metal processing and recycling operation on the East Coast. The company has recently completed a $25 million investment to its main processing plant in Owego. Upgrades included adding nonferrous separation technology including a polishing drum magnet system that removes electric motors containing copper armatures; four new ferrous metal separation systems using eddy currents; a dual-energy X-Ray separator that identifies metal particles by atomic density; six new dry-heavy media plants to remove copper from aluminum; optic color sorters that analyze metals by shape and color to trigger automatic separation; and a new $8 million dollar system that separates copper wire from plastic insulation.

“We have made significant investments to improve Upstate’s nonferrous metal recovery system, and with Kris on board we have the best management in place to align with our expansion strategy,” Weitsman comments.