The shredder includes new features that reduce maintenance costs and improve ease of use.

SSI Shredding Systems Inc., Wilsonville, Oregon, has updated its Pri-Max primary reducer shredder to include new technologies and features that decrease maintenance costs and improve ease of use. The Pri-Max primary reducer shredder is built to reduce the volume of bulky materials while achieving processing rates of up to 150 tons per hour. According to SSI, the shredder can be incorporated into a system as a primary shredder or used as a stand-alone machine. SSI offers multimaterial reducers that range from 200 horsepower to 600 horsepower.

“SSI continually monitors customer feedback and uses it as the catalyst for product innovation,” says Dave Fleming, director of sales and marketing at SSI. “Pri-Max machines are typically the first step in large processing systems, making them a critical component to customer productivity and success.”

In 2018, SSI began to engineer new technology for maintenance and replacement of wear parts. “Customers wanted longer service intervals and more flexibility in how they could choose to maintain wear parts in their machines,” Fleming says.

SSI reports that its patented “cartridge” table allows the entire wear parts package to be replaced without the need to remove the drive group, bearings or hydraulic connections. Regular hardfacing can be accomplished in the machine or offline as the customer chooses. According to a news release from SSI, this design reduces the time required for service and related downtime.

SSI adds that the heavy-duty, open grate cutting table and strategic cutter placement ensure that abrasives, including aggregate, sand, soils and metal fragments fall directly through the cutting table, reducing wear and operating costs. The extra heavy-duty welded cutting table is available in a variety of configurations to control output size and performance.

Additionally, SSI reports that it has added a new “stackable shaft” design for its Pri-Max machines to allow cutters and spacers to easily slide off the fully welded shafts on the shredders. SSI says these parts can now be replaced while reusing the shafts. This also allows the entire machine to be configurable if material or output needs change. SSI reports that the bidirectional cutters grab, pierce and break materials. They can be hardfaced or tips can be replaced inside the machine or offline as needed.

“These machines have always been popular. We are excited to offer both new and existing customers the ability to have these new features that will reduce the time needed to exchange wear parts, reduce the cost of the parts themselves and simplify the process of working on the machine in general,” Fleming says.

For the week ending Oct. 3, the capability utilization rate was 66.6 percent.

U.S. raw steel production for the week ending Oct. 3 was 1.484 million net tons, while the capability utilization rate was 66.6 percent, according to the American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI), Washington. That compares with production of 1.8 million net tons for the week ending Oct. 3, 2019, when the capability utilization was 77.7 percent.

Production for the current week represents a 17.7 percent decrease from the same period in the previous year, AISI notes, though it is a 0.3 percent increase from the previous week of this year, ending Sept. 26. During that week, production was 1.48 million net tons at a capability utilization rate of 66.1 percent.

Steel mills in the southern district led production during the week ending Oct. 3, having produced 575,000 tons. The Great Lakes district produced 531,000 tons of raw steel; during that time frame, followed by the Midwest at 168,000, the northeast at 144,000 and western district at 66,000 tons. 

AISI notes that capability for the fourth quarter of this year is approximately 29.1 million tons compared with 30.4 million tons for the same period last year and 29.4 million tons for the third quarter of 2020. 

Despite the increasing production, Fastmarkets AMM reports that its sources believe the ferrous scrap market will move sideways rather than show signs of strength in October, pointing to good supply at yards and high inventory levels at mills. 

The publication quotes a Midwest scrap seller who says, " Everyone was hoping for upward momentum, but there are a lot of big dealers with a lot of big tonnages. Everyone has been run over with scrap offers, mills are long on inventory and there are not enough takers.” That source adds that mid-September deals evaporated, indicating mills had sufficient inventory. 

Fastmarkets AMM adds that a number of scrap orders have been booked on a to-be-determined basis by dealers "to prevent a disruption in shipments or because they did not want to find themselves with no order at the end of the trade." 

Recycling could play a role in increasing U.S. production of these metals.

President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order and also declared a national emergency Sept. 30 designed to expand the domestic mining industry, support mining jobs, alleviate unnecessary permitting delays and reduce U.S. dependence on China for critical minerals.

This recent executive order begins the process for the Department of the Interior to develop a program to use its authorities under the Defense Production Act (DPA) to fund mineral processing that protects U.S. national security.

According to the White House fact sheet on the order, the action is designed to accelerate the reopening and expansion of U.S. mines and processing plants.

“The United States is heavily reliant on imports of numerous critical minerals that are critical to America’s national security and economic prosperity, despite the presence of significant sources of some of these minerals across the United States,” the fact sheet reads.

The executive order follows five presidential determinations that Trump singed in July 2019 that found that domestic production of rare earth elements and materials is essential to the national defense.

China holds approximately 80 percent of the world’s rare earth element supplies, according to industry estimates.

The presidential determinations note that “the domestic production capability for” rare earth metals and alloys, heavy rare earth elements (separation and processing), light rare earth elements (separation and processing), samarium cobalt rare earth permanent magnets and neodymium iron boron rare earth sintered material and permanent magnets are “essential to the national defense.”

Prior to the presidential determinations, Trump signed Executive Order 13817, “A Federal Strategy to Ensure Secure and Reliable Supplies of Critical Minerals,” Dec. 20, 2017. This order included identifying critical minerals, developing faster permitting and finding new or better sources of those critical minerals.

Following that order, “the Secretary of the Interior conducted a review with the assistance of other executive departments and agencies (agencies) that identified 35 minerals that (1) are ‘essential to the economic and national security of the United States,’ (2) have supply chains that are ‘vulnerable to disruption,’ and (3) serve ‘an essential function in the manufacturing of a product, the absence of which would have significant consequences for our economy or our national security,’” the new executive order states.

The order goes on to state that these minerals are to make airplanes, computers, cellphones and advanced electronics in addition to being used in electricity generation and transmission systems. However, “For 31 of the 35 critical minerals, the United States imports more than half of its annual consumption. The United States has no domestic production for 14 of the critical minerals and is completely dependent on imports to supply its demand.”

On British Columbia-based American Manganese Inc.’s website, Larry W. Reaugh, president and chief executive officer of the company, states that the executive order “puts American Manganese in a favorable position given the company’s ability to alleviate the identified material dependencies and contribute to a solution as follows:

“The U.S. is 100 percent import-dependent on manganese and there is no substitution for manganese in the production of steel. Artillery Peak, Arizona, contains vast resources of manganese, and American Manganese holds a U.S. patent which can potentially be utilized for the production of electrolytic manganese metal (EMM) and electrolytic manganese dioxide. The company produced a prefeasibility report in 2012 on producing EMM from Artillery Peak resources. No action was taken on this pre-feasibility report due to the falling price of manganese, which was a result of overproduction in China.

“The critical materials list includes commonly used lithium-ion battery materials and American Manganese holds patents for recycling cathode materials used in lithium-ion batteries with high purity and recovery potential of lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese,” Reaugh continues.

American Manganese. focuses on recycling lithium-ion batteries with the RecycLiCo patented process that extracts cathode metals, such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese and aluminum at high purity.

According to a Forbes article, if Biden wins the presidential election, he is not likely to overturn the executive order but could make mining more difficult to the advantage of recyclers like American Manganese and Geomega Resources, another Canadian company that is looking to recycle rare earth elements used in batteries. That company is building a demonstration plant in Quebec.

Two bills before the U.S. Congress also address rare earth elements: Ted Cruz’s Onshoring Rare Earths (ORE) Act and the Reclaiming American Rare Earths (RARE) Act, a companion bill introduced in the House by Reps. Lance Gooden and Vicente Gonzalez.

Cruz says, “Our ability as a nation to manufacture defense technologies and support our military is dangerously dependent on our ability to access rare earth elements and critical minerals mined, refined and manufactured almost exclusively in China. Much like the Chinese Communist Party has threatened to cut off the U.S. from life-saving medicines made in China, the Chinese Communist Party could also cut off our access to these materials, significantly threatening U.S. national security. The ORE Act will help ensure China never has that opportunity by establishing a rare earth elements and critical minerals supply chain in the U.S."

The ORE Act is designed to reduce U.S. dependence on China and establish a supply chain for rare earth elements and critical minerals in the U.S. by providing tax incentives for the rare earths industry, including expanding and making permanent full-expensing provisions in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act; requiring the Department of Defense to source rare earth minerals and critical elements from the U.S.; and establishing grants for pilot programs to develop these materials in the U.S. that include at least 30 percent of the total amount of grants to projects relating to secondary recovery of these minerals and metals.

New York City-headquartered USA Rare Earth CEO Pini Althaus tells Forbes the company is “ready to assist” in the last area.

Forbes reports that USA Rare Earth’s processing facility in Colorado is operational and its magnet manufacturing plant should be running in 12 months. In early 2023, USA Rare Earth’s Round Top, Texas, mine also should be operational. That mine has 16 of 17 rare earth elements.

Federal $3.5 million grant will help Alabama university continue its research into the recycling of personal protective equipment.

Troy University, based in Troy, Alabama, has received a $3.5 million federal grant to help fund its research and development of methods to recycle personal protective equipment (PPE).

The production, sale and use of PPE, most commonly face masks, gloves and their packaging, has escalated in 2020 in reaction to the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Established medical waste companies such as Stericycle have been increasing their attention to the proper handling of PPE, although not necessarily focusing on recycling.

The Troy University center receiving the funding has traditionally focused on polymers and plastics research and recycling.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has awarded Troy’s Center for Materials and Manufacturing Sciences (CMMS) a three-year grant, which the university says is the third NIST grant awarded to the CMMS.

“The first two NIST grants were to set up the lab, and this one is to fund particular research projects,” says Dr. Govind Menon, director of Troy’s School of Science and Technology. “We are entering into the academic research phase of the center. This $3.5 million goes directly to research projects.”

The funding will allow TROY to hire four staff members to focus solely on research. “These are not faculty,” says Menon. “They’re here to do research and only research.”

Menon said the CMMS research, performed in collaboration with the University of Alabama at Birmingham College of Engineering, will aim to establish a full procedure, from decontamination to applications of the resulting materials, to recycle discarded PPE.

“We have already started the PPE part of the research, and we are beginning our analysis on how to reuse the materials,” Menon said. “This is certainly important with the pandemic in mind, but it’s relevant even beyond the pandemic. Medical PPE is something people have been afraid to touch, largely because of contamination. This is absolutely vital research, otherwise the waste generated by PPE will be enormous, in addition to existing waste.”

Founded in 2018 with support from the NIST, Troy University describes the CMMS as a fully integrated multi-disciplinary research facility focusing on research into polymers and polymer recycling.

Waupaca Foundry is the first U.S. metal caster to receive the ISO 50001 Energy Management System certification.

Waupaca Foundry Inc., a Hitachi Metals group company based in Waupaca, Wisconsin, has won the 2020 Green Foundry Sustainability Award presented by the American Foundry Society (AFS), Schaumburg, Illinois, for integrating sustainable business practices throughout its manufacturing operations. The award was presented during the AFS virtual conference Oct. 5.

The company implemented the ISO 50001 Energy Management System, creating a formal management system approach to energy reduction. Foundry leaders gather and analyze data that identifies opportunities for additional energy reduction in plant operations. As compared to 2010, Waupaca reduced its energy consumption by more than 20 percent at all its U.S. plants.

Waupaca Foundry says it is the first U.S. metal caster to receive ISO 50001 Energy Management System certification. To gain the certification, the company says it created and implemented a program in energy management at its gray iron foundry Plant 1 in Waupaca and then reviewed and checked data to ensure consistent results. After 12 months of preparation and completing a verification audit by an independent registrar, the certification was granted in 2017, the company says.

Waupaca Foundry President, Chief Operating Officer and CEO Mike Nikolai says energy is one of the company’s greatest expenses, costing about $150 million in fiscal 2019 across all Waupaca Foundry locations.

“We are setting the pace in our industry by committing to continuous improvement in environmental sustainability by reducing our energy use,” Nikolai says. “Our efforts not only reduce our impact on the environment but make us a more competitive iron castings supplier in the global marketplace.”

Some of the more significant recent initiatives include:

In 2015, Waupaca Foundry was admitted to Wisconsin’s Green Tier program, which recognizes businesses with a good environmental record, a willingness to exceed regulatory requirements and an environmental management system that facilitates superior environmental performance and continuous improvements.

Additionally, Kawasaki Motors Manufacturing Corp. awarded Waupaca Foundry its environmental stewardship award at its annual supplier conference in 2014. In 2010, Waupaca Foundry was one of the first 32 charter companies voluntarily cutting energy consumption through 2020 in the Better Plants program, a U.S. Department of Energy initiative designed to foster energy efficiency and long-term sustainability. Since the program’s baseline year of 2009 to 2015, Waupaca Foundry says it realized a cumulative energy intensity improvement of 16.3 percent.

A leading supplier of iron castings to the automotive, commercial vehicle, agriculture, construction and industrial markets, Waupaca Foundry produces gray iron castings, ductile iron castings, HNM series high-strength ductile iron and austempered ductile iron castings. The company operates seven iron foundries in Waupaca and Marinette, Wisconsin; Tell City, Indiana; and Etowah, Tennessee. The company operates machining and assembly plants in Waupaca and in Effingham, Illinois. Waupaca Foundry is a company of Tokyo-based Hitachi Metals Ltd. and employs approximately 4,500 people.