Equipment Report

Liberty Buys Auto Shredder

Liberty Iron & Metal Holdings LLC, Phoenix, and German-based Scholz AG have purchased a Metso/Texas Shredder 80/104 new generation heavy-service shredding plant with two 2,000-horsepower DC motors, as well as an Eriez Magnetics’ nonferrous system, including the ProSort and FinesSort metal recovery systems.

The system will be installed in Girard, Ohio, at a yard owned by LNM Holdings LLC. The shred facility is being formed as a new entity to be called Interstate Shredding LLC. It will be operational by December 2008.

The facility, in Eastern Ohio, is located on 50 acres. The former Columbia Iron facility is a ferrous yard, but Marc Olgin, a spokesman for Liberty Iron & Metal Southwest LLC, says it will become a full-service recycling yard.

When the auto shredder is installed, the company says it expects the yard to handle from 10,000 to 15,000 tons per month.

Liberty acquired two yards in the Eastern Ohio/Western Pennsylvania area in March. The company has a total of nine yards in North America.

Bruker AXS, Kennewick, Wash., has introduced the TracerTurboSD, which it describes as "the world’s first handheld X-ray fluorescence (XRF) instrument that uses a silicon drift detector (SDD) for dramatically improved speed, sensitivity and resolution."

Bruker’s XFlash SDD, previously available only in high-performance laboratory XRF instruments, offers speed and analytical specificity when integrated into the handheld TracerTurboSD, according to the company.

John Landefeld, vice president of Bruker AXS Handheld, says, "This breakthrough continues our tradition of technology leadership, going back to the initial introduction of tube-based XRF handhelds in 2001. Following the joint NASA-Bruker development of vacuum technology for handhelds in 2004, Bruker proves, once again, to be the technology leader in handheld XRF instrumentation."

In the aerospace industry, the proprietary Bruker SDD technology enables TracerTurboSD users to analyze sophisticated light element alloys, even without the use of a vacuum or helium attachment, according to the company. In the general metals analysis markets, the TracerTurboSD offers higher speed, sensitivity and selectivity.

Frank Laukien, president and CEO of Bruker, says, "We believe the TracerTurboSD will have enormous analytical benefits for handheld XRF users in the aerospace industry, and it truly represents a disruptive technology in this field."

According to Bruker, the TracerTurboSD can measure aluminum in titanium alloys and magnesium and silicon in aluminum alloys, with no vacuum or helium required. For additional sensitivity, Bruker-NASA vacuum technology can be combined with the SDD.

The analyzer includes all of the standard features of the Bruker S1 Tracer analyzer, such as grade ID and chemistry, a pass/fail analysis and a large grade library.

More information is available at www.bruker-axs.com/handheld.

Orwak Introduces New Baler

Swedish company Orwak has introduced its newest product, the Orwak 5040. The compact vertical baler is designed to bale PET plastic bottles and aluminum cans. The company says the 5040 is the only compact vertical baler on the market that can compact PET bottles with caps on.

Inspiration for the new baler came from a special order from Tomra Pacific’s California subsidiary, which operates the state’s RePlanet program to handle containers collected through California’s Redemption Value (CRV) program.

To facilitate the collection of CRV containers, RePlanet recycling centers were established in 2007 at strategic locations near malls and supermarkets throughout the state.

The centers needed a compaction solution to handle and store the growing volumes of PET bottles and cans and turned to Orwak, part of the Tomra Group, to develop a small baler that takes up minimal floor space. The result is a twin-chamber baler resembling a small Orwak 5070.

The bale height can be adjusted from 14 to 22 inches.

More information is available at www.orwak.com.