Thinking Small

Attendees at trade shows such as the ISRI (Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries Inc.) Convention & Exhibition or the recent IFAT-Entsorga event in Germany have been able to get a firsthand look at a type of processing equipment that has been attracting attention the past few years.

Several manufacturers now offer small-volume wire and cable chopping and separating units that can be purchased at a lower cost and occupy a smaller footprint than earlier systems.

At the IFAT event, which took place in Munich in mid-September, manufacturers such as Italy’s Guidetti srl and Denmark’s Eldan Recycling A/S displayed machines that are hand-fed modest amounts of mixed wire and cable and then quickly produce bright, clean copper chops.

ANOTHER OPTION

Managers of smaller scrap processing locations have always had a variety of options as to how to handle the wire and cable scrap they purchase.

Those who wish to put the minimum amount of labor hours into handling the material can box it in a Gaylord or bale it, making a decision as to whether to do any pre-sorting by wire thickness or exterior cladding type.

The decision as to how much sorting to do can often tie into whether the dealer intends to sell the material to an export broker or to a wire chopping specialist within North America. Domestic processors purchase mixed loads, but typically the less pre-sorting that is done, the more likely the material will be sold to an export destination where it will be sorted by hand.

Processors who have diligently sorted wire and cable by like coatings and thicknesses are considered to have material of interest to a wider number of domestic wire chopping specialists.

Depending on a processor’s assessment of his or her workforce’s availability and the profit margin to be gained, material may be stripped and cut to a uniform length before being shipped out. This results in material that can be of interest to an even wider pool of potential buyers.

And now more recently, with copper prices having settled in at an historically high trading range, processors are scrutinizing whether to outfit even their smaller-volume facilities with a scaled-down wire chopping machine that can allow them to produce a finished copper or aluminum chop product.

FITTING THE FOOTPRINT

As copper has gained in value in the past several years, equipment makers have responded by bringing smaller-scale, more affordable processing machines to a wider market.

Italy’s Guidetti EKO Series machines, available in the United States through Ecovery LLC (www.ecoveryllc.com), are described by the company as “ultra-compact plants” for the recycling of wire and cable.

The smallest of the four EKO models, the Micro, has been designed to process up to 110 pounds per hour of material, according to the company. The Micro from Guidetti stands shorter than 6 feet in height and has a footprint of 31.5 inches by 53.5 inches.

While these units can handle many types of wire and cable, they are being marketed as ideal options for smaller recyclers to process their thinner-gauge wire. This material is not typically worth stripping the way thicker-gauge cable can be.

Denmark-based equipment maker Eldan Recycling, which has a North American sales office in Sanborn, N.Y., has been manufacturing wire and cable recycling machinery since 1956.

In announcing the release of its Micro Module in 2010, the company says, “We learned that there is an increasing demand for cable recycling equipment for smaller quantities.”

Remarks Flemming Hansen, Eldan’s product manager for cable recycling, “To meet the demand for cable processing plants for smaller quantities, we have developed the Micro Module. Our customers do not wish to set aside the quality of the output, just because they have a smaller input quantity.”

Eldan says the Micro Module has an input capacity of 330 to 440 pounds per hour. “The input material [should be] dry, pre-cut cable without steel and with a maximum diameter of 15 to 20 millimeters (6 to 8 inches) and a maximum length of 300 to 400 millimeters (12 to 16 inches),” the company says in its news release announcing the new model.

The company says its Micro Module can handle a range of wire and cable types, including telephone wire, electrical building wire, power cables with copper or aluminum conductors, copper wire and “mixed household wire.”

Within the Eldan Micro Module units are “a granulator, a separator and a filter,” while the system is powered by a 22-kilowatt motor.

“The Micro Module is designed to fit in a 20-foot open-top container or on a truck and can easily be handled with a forklift. The Micro Module can achieve a metal purity of approximately 99.5 percent (up to 99.9 percent depending on type of cables and processing),” according to Eldan.

The unit takes up more floor space than the smallest Guidetti models, measuring nearly 12 feet by 7 feet and standing more than 10 feet tall.

SEVERAL MARKETS

Small-volume scrap processors are one target market for these entry-level machines, but not the only one, according to Joe Szany, director of equipment sales at Ecovery LLC, Loxley, Ala.

Szany says the North American market has responded enthusiastically to the Guidetti wire processing machines sold by Ecovery. The company has sold units (more than 100 of them) to scrap processors, electronic scrap recyclers, generators of wire and cable scrap such as electrical contractors. The company’s machines also have received interest from other potential customers, including an auto shredding plant operator.

The shedder operator is considering removing wiring harnesses from inbound auto hulks before they are placed onto the shredder infeed conveyor.

The technique would require some ongoing labor costs and an investment made to buy a small wire processing machine, but the harvesting of No. 1 or No. 2 copper chops instead of pieces of copper that are part of a downstream red metals mix may prove more than worthwhile.

All buyers of these machines, says Szany, are calculating their cost to operate a small wire processing machine for a few hours per week vs. the spread in per-pound upgraded product prices they’ll receive.

Determining yield—the percentage of metal in wire and cable versus the plastic coating percentage—can be another motivator, says Szany.

While processors or scrap generators may have no reason to distrust the yield figures they receive from buyers of their unprocessed cable, “people are satisfied in knowing they are in control and being able to determine their exact yield percentage,” says Szany.

The $3-and-more-per-pound copper market of the past several years in particular has served to boost the interest in these smaller units, says Szany, and pricing at these levels means the math can make sense for many of the company’s potential customers.

Szany notes that the smallest Guidetti model available from Ecovery can be purchased for $32,000. “If you’re going to enhance the value of your material by 50 cents per pound or maybe more, you can probably afford one of these units, even if you only process 300 or 400 pounds per day,” he comments.

The boom copper market of the 2000 to 2010 era has had many different effects on the scrap market, with one of them being the creation of a more diffused and dispersed wire chopping industry.

The author is editor-in-chief of Recycling Today and can be contacted at btaylor@gie.net.