Wendt, Didion form strategic partnership

Wendt Corp., Buffalo, New York, has announced that it is entering into an exclusive partnership with Missouri-based Didion International Inc. The two companies report that they plan to combine Wendt’s scrap processing solutions with Didion’s rotary drum technology. According to a news release from Wendt, the partnership will leverage experience from both companies in their respective specialties in order to expand and improve Wendt’s product portfolio to exclusively offer Didion’s metal polishing drums to the scrap recycling industry.

The two companies say they were introduced to one another while working on a project for a special scrap recycling application in 2016.

“After working together on that project, our companies learned a lot about one another,” says Mark Didion, vice president of systems integration at Didion. “Our rotary technology was the right fit for cleaning scrap and partnering with Wendt to provide a complete solution just made sense for this endeavor together. We’ve designed these drums to incorporate our over 40 years of expertise in the cleaning of metals. They include special features that are not just designed to polish the metal, but to classify it to be ready for downstream equipment.”

Wendt Corp.

Quality expectations for metal scrap commodities continue to rise, adds Wendt Business Development Manager Bill Close. He says, “The metal cleaning and polishing product line that we have developed with Didion will provide a competitive advantage to our customers beyond metal sorting creating packages that are bright, polished and clean to the touch.” 

With the inclusion of the Didion metal polishing drums into the Wendt product portfolio, Wendt will offer domestic and export drums in 10 tons per hour (tph), 20 tph and 30 tph sizes that are designed to remove dirt, debris and surface contamination/oxidation from metal. Wendt says the domestic drum is ideally suited as preparation to an XRT plant or heavy media plant, processing a variety of aluminum and stainless-steel scrap commodities such as zorba and zurik. The company says the export drum is built to meet the proposed Chinese export requirements for zorba by adding screening to separate the cleaned and polished zorba into three sized products directly into a bagging system ready for export.

“The Wendt-Didion partnership is a powerful combination,” says Wendt President Tom Wendt. “We have once again partnered with a technology leader in their industry to customize a product to meet our industry requirements. The incorporation of Didion’s technology into our systems is revolutionary for consumers of shredded commodities. We believe the technology will be widely adopted and sets a new standard in the quality of melt-ready commodities.”