Shred1 brings improved yields and quality to FPT

Detroit-based Ferrous Processing & Trading (FPT) is one of America’s largest scrap processing firms, operating several auto shredding plants and downstream sorting systems in the Great Lakes region and in Florida.

FPT Ohio, which operates five locations in the Buckeye State, has Drew Luntz as its president. He comes from a family that has been involved in scrap recycling for more than a century, with a metals shredding background that dates back to 1967. FPT, likewise, has deep roots in shredding, operating some of the Motor City’s largest and longest-tenured shredding sites.

Drew Luntz says FPT and its veteran shredding plant operators have familiarity with and experience-based respect for magnetic and sorting equipment made by Pennsylvania-based Eriez.

At the ISRI2014 Convention in Las Vegas, Luntz says a visit to the Eriez display helped introduce him and FPT to the company’s Shred1 ballistic separator. The Shred1 has been designed to help processors create a low-copper ferrous shred product by dividing the purest iron and steel stream into one fraction that contains about 70 percent of the ferrous shred. The remaining 30 percent, which may be nonferrous metal or have attachments, can then be introduced as a smaller stream to hand pickers and the downstream sorting system.

Like shredding and downstream sorting companies everywhere, FPT has “been experimenting and working hard toward manually extracting the copper and the rubber and the dirt physically out of the shredded for many, many years,” says Luntz. “We saw Shred1 as a more systematic, automatic approach to getting the scrap to be cleaned mechanically,” he adds. The Shred1 has been able to help FPT compensate for a “human factor that had the potential to make us more inconsistent than what we were happy with for our customers.”

The positive results of the Shred1, installed in August 2014, have been easy to see, Luntz says, citing both recovery volumes and product quality. “It increased the yields of our shred. The product was cleaner and was consistently lower in copper. It has done it day in day out, consistently. So, it’s really been a success.”

FPT has numerous ferrous shred buyers depending on specific chemistries, which prompts the firm to explore sorting technology advances. “We work with innovative companies to come up with solutions to long-time problems or challenges with producing quality scrap,” Luntz says. “Eriez worked with us to come up with a mechanical system that satisfied our needs, as well as the needs of our customers.”

For FPT, turning to Eriez provided a good outcome in the form of the Shred1. “It was a real cooperative effort and a real win-win. The Shred1 has really done its job and is performing extremely well,” he states.

For more information on the Eriez Shred1, visit www.eriez.com/Shred1.