Blog Archives

WTE facilities incinerate collected municipal refuse to produce electricity; they also recover ferrous and non-ferrous recyclable scrap.

Each year, Waste-to-Energy (WTE) plants along the East Coast generate over 500,000 gross tons of post-burn municipal ferrous scrap. These facilities incinerate collected municipal refuse to produce electricity, which is sold back to local power grids.

During incineration, both ferrous and non-ferrous metals are recovered from the waste stream, sorted, processed, and sold as recyclable scrap. WTE scrap is a secondary grade due to contamination and density. How can WTE operators improve their quality and revenue opportunities?

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Sub-standard scrap poses significant risk to your shredder, people, the surrounding environment — and your entire business. One explosion due to a compressed tank could mean months of closure — or business bankruptcy and closure.

In this blog post, I’ll cover the materials that can wreak havoc with your inbound stream, as well as causing minor to major issues — from a clogged system or broken parts to increased costs and environmental hazards.

Heavy or dense raw material

“Heavies” are raw materials that are simply too heavy in size and density/mass and therefore can’t be easily shredded. Heavies inevitably damage internal components of your shredder, including castings such as hammers and pins, and material handling systems.

Damage from heavies can cause prolonged periods of downtime and safety risks to operations personnel when replacing damaged components.

Damaged wear part (upper left) due to “heavies.”

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Excessive moisture in your shredding process is an ongoing challenge. Lessening the amount of moisture can have a significant improvement on your bottom line, especially during weather-related inclement months.

Excessive moisture can cause the following issues:

Excessive oxidation
Poor scrap quality of FE (ferrous) and NF (non-ferrous) is mostly associated with excessive oxidation of the finished product, and represents yield loss for the end consumer.

Most domestic FE and NF scrap is consumed within the period when it’s transferred from the processer to the end consumer – generally within 30 days or less.

When this material is shipped internationally via export container or bulk vessel, however, the travel time from processor to end consumer is increased by an average of one (1) to two (2) months – causing a lot more oxidation to take place and yield loss for the consumer.

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