No baling out: even though shredder plants are mushrooming, ferrous cut grades remain in the melt shop mix.

Scrap recyclers and shredding equipment makers have been spending a lot of time together during this decade's scrap metals boom. The trend is impossible to miss, as established shredding plants have been refurbished and expanded at a steady pace, while new plants have also been purchased throughout North America.

Recyclers who wish to address the obsolete scrap stream have staked their capital budgets on the shredder as an ideal way to harvest ferrous and nonferrous scrap.

The growth of this processing method has not doomed the baler or the shear, however. Both recyclers and equipment makers note that there are still reasons to deploy machines to squeeze and cut scrap metal.

KEEP IT CLEAN. Just as shredders and the obsolete scrap stream (particularly post-consumer automobiles and appliances) can go together so well, likewise balers and shears continue to find their matches with other types of scrap.

The clips and stampings that come from manufacturing plants don't gain value when introduced into the shredder mix--in fact, quite the opposite.

As much as clean shredded scrap has become an increasingly common and valuable feedstock at electric arc furnace (EAF) steel mills, the grade still trades several dollars per ton lower, in most cases, then clean, prompt industrial clips.

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Whether at a scrap yard or directly at a generation point, scrap recyclers can get the best price for such clips by keeping them clean and separate from other streams and baling the clips.

"They are still making auto bundles," remarks Doug Sebastian, vice president of Harris Press & Shear, Peachtree City, Ga. He notes that the scrap companies that provide scrap handling services at auto stamping plants and at other generation points of clean, high-grade scrap have no interest in mingling that material with any other grades.

In such cases, "these companies will have a tendency to buy, say, one of the three-compression balers" made by Harris, or a similar baling machine.

Curt Spry, scrap sales manager with Al-jon, Ottumwa, Iowa, also cites "clean clips" as an ongoing source of demand for balers. "We have one customer here locally who bales skeleton sheet coming out of a factory; he makes a nice tight bale to go straight to the furnace," says Spry.

Regional demand for feedstock can also steer a recycler toward using a baler or shear. Aaron Buck, who is in operations with American Auto Iron & Metal, Fond du Lac, Wis., says that foundries and mills in his region are not all seeking shredded grades.

The company, which owns a 500-ton shear purchased from Sierra International Machinery, Bakersfield, Calif., moves the portable unit between three different Wisconsin locations.

Some of the material prepared by American Auto Iron & Metal is eventually also run through a shredder, says Buck, but not all of it. Whether it is heading to a shredder yard or a different destination, the common denominator is the desire to maximize shipping efficiency. "You can never pack as much unprepared iron into a truck as you can prepared iron," Buck remarks.

Spry also sees that as a virtue and selling point for balers. "With the price of fuel today, you can't afford to get only 10 or 11 tons on a load," he remarks, "especially if you're hauling it 150 or 250 miles." His example: "A scrap yard making several shipments a week, its shipping costs are cut in half if it has a baler and is reaching maximum payload."

Balers purchased by auto recyclers can be used for purposes beyond compressing car bodies, Spry notes. "Recyclers can use a baler for nonferrous bales as well," he remarks. "We're selling balers into the auto salvage industry to customers who are not only logging car bodies, but also baling radiators, copper wiring, aluminum bumpers--things like that."

At the Sarasota, Fla., Trademark-Scrap-All location, that is exactly what one of the company's Sierra balers is doing, according to Jeremy Wax. "The mobile equipment I have happens to be on a trailer, and in the Sarasota yard it moves from the ferrous area to the nonferrous area as needed."

PREP WORK. In addition to clean factory scrap, shears and balers are also closely associated with the thick plate and structural steel grades that come from demolition sites, service centers and other scrap generation sources.

Some of these grades of steel are beginning to be processed with the largest, heaviest-duty shredders now in service.

But shears still get called upon to prepare a healthy percentage of the beam, plate and other structural steels being generated at demolition sites, service centers and other places.

"Facilities that are in a market where they are purchasing a lot of plate, structural and so forth, they are looking for a shear instead of a shredder," says Sebastian.

The topic of to what extent shredders can displace large shears and balers was the subject of a session at the 2007 ISRI (Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries Inc.) Annual Convention earlier this year in New Orleans.

At that session, Metal Management's Matthew Parker, a director of ferrous trading based at the company's Newark, N.J., location, noted that as many as 39 of the shredders now in operation are relatively new super-sized or mega-shredders with larger rotors and the ability to shred through as much as 60,000 tons per month of scrap.

Parker remarked that car bodies and white goods alone could not keep this added capacity busy, but that instead material that has traditionally been baled and sheared is being fed to these heavy-duty shredders. "The shift has already started ... away from cut grades," he declared.

But he also commented that not all trends are unanimously in favor of shredding. Parker noted that Turkish steel mills, the largest ferrous scrap buyers off the East Coast, "do not particularly like shredded scrap" because of mill-specific technical reasons.

Nonetheless, Parker declared, "We're going to produce more shredded scrap, and we are going to be able to sell it."

Gerdau Ameristeel Director of Technology Stuart Gray noted that electric arc furnace mills see advantages in melting predominantly shredded scrap because of the grade's density, which yields time and energy savings.

The disadvantages of using 100 percent shredded scrap, though, can include a higher feedstock cost and chemistry that can vary and be off-spec in the amounts of tramp elements such as copper and tin.

TAG TEAM. Although larger, stationary shears and balers may be competing with shredding plants for some feedstock, smaller, portable balers are increasingly working in tandem with shredders to prepare desirable grades.

Automobile hulks, appliances and mixed loose scrap grades are increasingly being partially processed at smaller facilities for shipment to a shredding plant to complete the conversion into mill-ready feedstock.

Spry says that Al-jon has shipped several units both to large companies feeding their own super-sized shredders or to smaller recyclers preparing material to go to these plants.

"Some of these operators are baling the feedstock themselves," notes Spry. This could include the operators of auto dismantling operations that are owned by shredding plant operators such as Schnitzer Steel Industries, David J. Joseph Co. and Ferrous Processing & Trading.

Owners of portable units are baling "primarily appliances and automobiles, but even some of the heavier stuff they might be shredding," says Spry.

Processing something twice may seem questionable at first glance, but in an era of high fuel costs and a trucking industry that is strained to overcapacity, the reason is again often tied to shipping efficiency.

"You've still got people who are shipping five or six car bodies at a time," says Spry, "but if you log them, you can get 17 or 18 bodies on a trailer. It's the same with appliances--baling them versus jamming them onto a trailer with a grapple pays off pretty quickly."

At Harris, Sebastian is witnessing steady demand for larger, fixed units. Part of that has to do with mill demand. "Many other parts of the world still have basic oxygen furnace mills as the consuming base," he notes. These mills are much more accepting of baled material versus the preference by EAF melt shop managers for shred and loose clips.

In the United States, however, the smaller, potentially portable units are where the dollars are flowing. "You do see a decline in the big balers," says Sebastian, "but whether by shredder operators or others, there is still a lot of baling of material occurring in the market."

WHEN TO BUY

Scrap recyclers have continued to find uses for machines that bale and shear ferrous scrap. But in a changing market, how do company managers know when it might be time to invest in a new baling machine?

Factors listed by manufacturers and recyclers include business growth, space considerations, the need to save on shipping costs and the need to replace an aging machine

Some recyclers may find their yards getting cluttered, remarks Curt Spry of Al-jon, Ottumwa, Iowa, "so they need the baler to create space."

In addition to saving space, that same machine will allow the recycler to save on shipping costs as that scrap heads to its next destination.

Even if there is still a little bit of elbow room, an increased flow of scrap could indicate that it's a good time to buy. "The rule of thumb is, if you're producing 150 to 200 tons of baleable scrap per month, you can pretty well justify a baler," says Spry.

According to Aaron Buck of American Auto & Iron of Fond du Lac, Wis., which owns a T500 model shear purchased from Sierra International Machinery, Bakersfield, Calif., the portability allows his company to prevent clutter and improve shipping efficiency from all three locations with just a little bit of advance planning.

The author is editor in chief of Recycling Today and can be contacted at [e-mail].