Garden Street tunes into UHF for material upgrade

Operators of auto shredding plants can produce several different grades of nonferrous metals, and when properly equipped can respond to changing scrap markets. Garden Street Iron & Metal, a family-owned business with one shredder yard in Florida and another in Ohio, has been using an ultra high-frequency (UHF) eddy current supplied by Eriez to make one such crucial adjustment.

Garden Street is owned by the Weber family. Earl Weber Sr. co-founded the company along with a brother and with his wife Margaret, who passed away in 2011. After starting a yard in Cincinnati in 1958, Earl Sr., Margaret and their son Rob purchased a scrap yard in Fort Myers, Florida, in 1988 that now hosts a shredding plant.

The Webers have expanded their Cincinnati operations through the years also. Today, the Ohio location is managed by Earl Jr. and his grandson Tyler, who represents the fourth generation of Webers involved in Garden Street Iron & Metal.

As an operations manager, Tyler has recently worked with Eriez to help solve a dilemma at the Ohio yard. When the stainless steel-heavy zurik grade began falling out of favor in global and domestic markets, Garden Street needed to figure out how to reprocess it to produce marketable metals.

The answer came in the form of the UHF eddy current from Eriez. According to Tyler, the UHF has helped clean up mixed fines from the shredder line. “We put it on the end of our fines recovery line, where it recovers extra-small cast aluminum and copper wire fractions that other eddies were not getting,” he says.

For the problematic zurik, Tyler worked with Mike Shattuck, Eriez Recycling Market Manager, to create a customized solution. “We determined an American Pulverizer ring mill could help liberate materials from each other in this zurik grade as it knocked the pieces down to one-half-inch in size,” Tyler says.

The smaller pieces created feedstock for the UHF that was ideal for it to “get out the aluminum and especially the copper—the UHF really agitates it well,” according to Tyler.

Whether sorting the zurik or the shredder fines, the UHF at Garden Street Iron & Metal acts as “its own independent fines line,” Tyler says. “We run it slow and it creates this really nice copper-rich product.”

Tyler says he is proud to be part of a good relationship between the Weber family and Eriez. He says, “I feel like I have a direct line with Eriez; that’s just not always the case with other vendors. I have a great relationship with Mike, and support from the whole company has been great since this shredder was installed seven years ago.”

For more information on the UHF and other Eriez separation technology, visit www.eriez.com/ECS.