Jonathan Schulberg may not have been in the resource recovery industry as long as some, but he does remember the days when separating out the different waste streams was not only unimportant, but nobody even thought about getting a monetary return. How the industry has changed. Schulberg is the Australian business development manager for Eriez, a US-based company based – unsurprisingly – out of Erie, Pennsylvania, in the US.
Machinery designed for source separation is just one of the various products the company specialises in, and Schulberg is aware how important a good piece of kit can help with a company’s bottom line, especially if they can extract valuable metals.
“The machinery we have today has shown massive improvements in recovery efficiencies,” he said. “In the past, you were relying on people manually sifting through material. Our range makes that a lot easier.
“For example, our eddy current separator does effectively the reverse of what a magnet does. A magnet attracts ferrous material, while the eddy current repels only conductive non-ferrous materials – aluminium, copper, brass, and the like. Over time, these materials have been able to garner a sell price per tonne higher than what is scrapped steel.
Once collected, said Schulberg, aluminium can go on the market for as low as $1,100 a tonne or up to $2,000 a tonne. He said there is another bonus in that you also end up with a relatively clean waste stream once the separators have done their job.
“If they can recover a high proportion of their metals in their stream, that essentially means more dollars for them,” said Schulberg. “Imagine if you have one or two tonnes recovered per day to three or four tonnes recovered per day? If aluminium is going at $1,300 a tonne, and you can recover four tonnes of it, that’s a reasonable amount of additional revenue that you’re making daily. And most plants would operate at a minimum eight hours a day.”
But one of the key features of Eriez’s offering that Schulberg wants to highlight is its locale. While the company has its origins in the Northern Hemisphere, it has had a presence in Australia for over 50 years. It manufactures its own product, and it doesn’t buy in non-Eriez products.
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“One of our key benefits from a customer’s point of view is that because we’re local, we offer local service and support,” he said.
“And that became very important during the times of COVID. A lot of companies that we were dealing with had equipment from other companies that was supplied from overseas, and they were struggling to have that equipment supported locally. We were in a very advantageous position because everything was based in Australia, so it was easier for us to get equipment and help our local customers.”
Also, customers have to look out for hidden costs – unintentional or otherwise. Because a lot of Eriez product is manufactured locally, it already complies with the standards required by Australia’s regulatory authorities. With some equipment, these standards are strict and must be adhered to for safety reasons. There have been cases where cheap imports have had to be amended to make sure they meet local standards, which has meant any cost savings that a client may have made in the initial price is eaten up, or sometimes exceeded, by them having to upgrade the piece of equipment so it can be legally operated in Australia. This is not the case for Eriez plants or machinery.
This is why when clients buy from Eriez, the equipment is ready to go. And what are some of its hero pieces of machinery? Schulberg says it’s hard to go past its aforementioned eddy separators that recover nonferrous metals.
“We utilise high gradient magnetic elements, which operate at a high rotational RPM that produces the eddy current field,” said Schulberg.
“With a few different designs in the rotor makeup itself, we can recover very fine, non-ferrous metals – we’re talking one millimetre plus – through to very coarse material streams that are 25 millimetres plus.”
He said that the area of application is wide with eddy current separators, which means they can also work low volumes in industries like PET plastics, as well as fine materials such as sands, through to industrial applications like C&D and C&I plants, where the material loads are heavy.
There is a range of eddy current separator widths available from one metre wide up to two metres wide that can cater to most resource recovery applications. As far as process loads themselves, Eriez engineers can modulate to increase the quantity of them to meet a customer’s processing requirements and capacities.
“That’s something that’s very simply and easily done, whether it’s via an EPC engineering company or with the customer directly,” said Schulberg. “The eddy currents themselves are very low on maintenance costs. We’ve designed these units over time to get them to a point where they can operate for years on end, with very little customer involvement to keep them up and running.”
Over the next 18 months to two years, Schulberg can only see Eriez – and the industry has a whole – growing. He sees many factors for this, such as local and state governments knowing their constituents want more recycling, companies wanting social licenses, as well as a growing population creating more waste that need recycling.
“As we generate more waste, we need to process more volume,” he said. “It’s a constant cat and mouse game for the waste processing industry – staying ahead of the curve and understanding where the growth centres are situated. We have to get the infrastructure and everything in place. Once that population hits a certain point, we’re well prepared to handle the waste generated from those places.”