Greenberg Engineering Celebrates Anniversary

Recycling equipment supplier Greenberg Engineering Co., Bala Cynwyd, Pa., is celebrating its 75th anniversary in business in 2010, according to the company’s William B. Greenberg.

Elmer H. Greenberg, who was born in what is now Belarus in 1895, founded the firm in 1935. He came to the United States at the age of two in 1897, graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1917 and then promptly served in the U.S. Army in World War I.

According to William Greenberg, Elmer’s son, Elmer pioneered the design of nonferrous metal recycling processes and equipment at the Girard Smelting & Refining Co. in Philadelphia starting in 1927.

Elmer Greenberg left Girard Smelting in 1935 and founded the company that, in 1950, would change its name to Greenberg Engineering Co.

Elmer worked on a wide variety of projects in sectors as diverse as lead battery smelting, brass ingot manufacturing, hot-dip galvanizing and chlorine separation of lead and tin.

In 1937 he started building and selling portable items such as cable strippers and iron detectors. “He developed a patented high pressure water spray fume collector, which he installed on lead reverb and blast furnace installations,” says William. “He was a pioneer in insisting that besides stopping air pollution, they made economic sense because otherwise 5 percent of the charge would be lost from a lead blast furnace.”

William says he also learned from his father, “Because of the tremendous variation in the price, demand & supply of secondary metals, he felt that Greenberg had to have a diversified line of products, so at any one time we would have something for whatever was the ‘in’ metal.”

William says he started helping Elmer when quite in 1937 and started attending the University of Pennsylvania, but his education was interrupted by service in the U.S. Army in World War II.

Bill re-joined the firm in 1947 after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, where he continued studying metallurgy for a number years.

Greenberg Engineering continued to develop new processes and products and cultivated customers throughout the world, says William, and has been granted about 20 patents, has sold about 1,800 pieces of equipment and has been involved in engineering projects at about 400 plants, says William.