Opportunities abound

Fires burning at a pair of melt furnaces at secondary aluminum slab and billet producer Matalco’s plant in Franklin, Kentucky, are bright. The location’s future, though, could be even brighter.

Matalco, headquartered in Brampton, Ontario, operates seven facilities across North America and is co-owned by the Brampton-based Giampaolo Group and London-based Rio Tinto. In December 2022, Matalco expanded its operations to Franklin, where two furnaces work together to melt and mold aluminum ingots.

Located near the Kentucky-Tennessee border, the Franklin facility is Matalco’s southernmost site. Franklin Plant Manager Brandon Perkins says one of the reasons for the location was a contract stipulation between Matalco and Paris-based aluminum product manufacturer Constellium, which has a facility in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and is Matalco Franklin’s biggest customer. Per the contract, Matalco is required to have a facility within a set radius of Muscle Shoals, so, Perkins says, purchasing a 107-acre plot of land with a 560,000-square-foot plant in the required area was a great investment for Matalco, which put about $65 million into the site.

Nicole Ferrari, Matalco’s marketing and communications director, sees the large and thriving aluminum sector in Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama as another advantage, adding that the company wants to contribute to the local value chain and economy.

Systems in use

Perkins says some scrap processed at the Franklin site is sourced from Matalco’s Brampton-based sister company, Triple M Metal, but much of it comes from customers in the area who can bring scrap to the facility as a one-for-one mechanism: Matalco melts and processes raw materials to the customer’s specifications before casting and delivering a final product.

Aluminum is front-loaded onto a charge car that automatically communicates load weight to the first furnace. Perkins notes the Franklin facility is one of only four Matalco sites to have a charge car. Once material goes into the first furnace, it melts under a temperature of 1,360 F generated from four alternating burners. The melted material then goes into a 1,300 F two-burner holding furnace that casts it into ingots. The completed product can be prepared for delivery back to a customer and, here, Perkins emphasizes the site’s most unique piece of mobile equipment: a straddle carrier from Combilift, based in Greensboro, North Carolina.

“It’s almost like a mobile crane,” Perkins says. “It actually goes down and cradles the ingot and can transport that ingot securely and safely versus having it on a fork truck, which is the more standard way of carrying it.”

The Franklin facility is expected to produce 166 million pounds of aluminum ingot in its first year, short of its projected capacity of 270 million pounds. At optimum efficiency, the facility will produce a final product every four hours, Perkins says, though currently it takes about six. Perkins says Matalco anticipated this difference because of the learning curve of bringing a new plant online while training its workforce.

About 80 percent of the facility’s current employees are new to the industry, in part, Perkins says, because of pervasive turnover rates across the field. Although initial plans for the facility expected a workforce of 60 employees, concerns over turnover led Perkins to hire a team of 80 to ford any labor shortages that could arise in the future. Perkins says the extra staffing allows for an extra person in each department, making the size of each shift approximately 10 employees.

Onboarding during every employee’s first week includes seminars from human resources on policies and regulations followed by a day of safety training for hazardous situations.

After some time understanding the environmental side of the operation, new employees learn about the quality of Matalco’s product and how to manage it. On the fourth day of onboarding, employees are divided by department and undergo standard operating procedure training. Onboarding concludes with hands-on practice with the mobile equipment that pertains to individual departments.

The Franklin staff works in four shifts, each including a supervisor, team leader, casting operators, charging operators and saw operators.

“With this process being continuous, you’re likely to walk into it at any stage of the process,” Perkins says. “The first thing we do in every shift [is] have a 10-minute safe start meeting. We discuss any safety issues or safety concerns [and] we discuss any quality issues or quality concerns, down to production and maintenance.

“We have this 10-minute toolbox meeting before every shift; that’s where you usually find out the status of the operation. Whether you’re already in the melt cycle, you already have the cast cycle, if you just started a charge, you really find out what stage of the process you’re in. After that, the employees go out and they do a shift handoff.”

Maintenance crews work alongside regular staff each shift. Perkins says two maintenance technicians are assigned to each crew, with 80 percent of their time used for regularly scheduled maintenance work, while the rest of the time is reserved for emergencies. Scheduled maintenance activities can include checking fittings, gearboxes, motors and other basic preventative measures.

“Typically, you get about five years out of your melter and eight years out of your holder line because your melter usually takes more of a beating—you’re putting more raw material into it, scraping walls and things that fall on it, hitting the floor,” Perkins says. “Versus [the] holder line where you’re just transferring already-melted liquid aluminum into it, so there’s less damage being done.”

Looking ahead

Franklin is nearing completion of its first year in operation, and Perkins says he is confident his team will summit the learning curve in time for next year, during which he says the facility is projected to produce at full capacity.

He adds that Matalco feels so strongly about the opportunities at the Franklin facility that it established the infrastructure for a second melting furnace at the same time as the other two furnaces. However, there currently is no timeline for when that new furnace will be installed. Robert Roscetti, vice president of corporate development at Matalco, says the company currently is procuring bids for the equipment.

Whenever the additional furnace does come online, the facility will be capable of producing 390 million pounds of aluminum ingot slab annually.

“Our goal is to produce the best quality aluminum product in the region, or in North America, for that matter,” Perkins says. “We have 560,000 square feet and we’re not occupying it all. I think the opportunity for Matalco Franklin is still unlimited with having so much unoccupied space. We still have a lot of opportunity for growth under our roof.”

The author was a summer intern with the Recycling Today Media Group.