This posts shreds the editor in me.

I mean, it's spelled out in the article at least 15 times.

Behold the Mega Shredder: Jersey City recycling plant turns cars to confetti in seconds

By Ed Beeson/The Star-Ledger
April 28, 2013 at 8:31 AM

Once upon a time, someone stepped into the red sedan and felt pride when its engine turned for the first time.

Now, no longer. After likely tens of thousands of miles and many undesired repairs, the car was just another offering last week to the mega shredder of Jersey City.

Plucked by a material handler from a mountain of graying scrap, the vehicle was placed on a conveyor belt. It inched forward with the rest of the gnarled metal until, several stories up, it slid down into the mega shredder?s gully. Here, out of sight, an array of 1,100-pound hammers, turned by a 100-ton rotor, greeted it.

Ten violent seconds later, little more than fist-sized bits remained.

Such is the end for hundreds of vehicles each day at Claremont Terminal, and for countless other things of metal, from refrigerators to rebar.

The yard?s mega shredder can consume about 4,000 tons of assorted scrap a day, officials here say. But the goal isn?t simply to grind obsolete everyday objects into unrecognizable clumps. Rather, the aim is to feed something with a bigger appetite than a mega-shredder: the global commodities market.

A taste for zorba

Officials with Sims Metal Management, which owns Claremont Terminal and about 270 other scrap yards across the globe, proudly refer to their business as above-ground mining. Recycling is the core of what they do, and out of the 4,000 tons of scrap the mega-shredder consumes each day emerges some 2,800 to 3,000 tons of steel, aluminum, copper, brass and a mishmash they call zorba, according to Joe Payesko, general manager for Claremont Terminal and other regional facilities.

?It comes in as scrap, it leaves as a commodity,? said Dan Strechay, a Sims spokesman.

And when it leaves, it?s usually via deep-water vessels docking in the harbor that Claremont shares with an exclusive gated community called Port Liberte, and the even more exclusive Liberty National Golf Course.

The ships? destination: smelters overseas. About 90 percent of Claremont?s scrap is ocean-bound. Turkey is a big buyer, as is South Korea.

Strechay stresses the environmental side of what the scrap business does. It keeps reusable materials out of landfills and offsets some of the ecological damage of mining for iron ore. But the bottom line is scrap also makes money. The stuff nets between $370 to $390 a gross ton when it?s delivered domestically, Payesko said. Overseas buyers pay about the same.

And while there are significant challenges to the business ? Claremont managers have to be agile to respond to falling commodity prices ? all in all, scrap is recession-proof, they say. There simply is too much demand worldwide for new products, new buildings, new anything that needs metal.

An 83-acre kitchen

During a visit last week, workers in massive dump trucks were busy filling barges ? 20 tons at a time ? with a specially blended, low-copper mix. They had a few hours before a ship docked for a 27,000-ton meal, and then get underway for a mill in Mexico.

?Making steel is like cooking. Each steel maker has his own recipe,? Strechay said as he walked down a valley separating mountains of rust-colored chunks.

Part of what makes Claremont Terminal a crown jewel of Sims? global empire is the fact that it sits on 83 acres along the Hudson River. Clear days afford splendid views of the Statue of Liberty and Lower Manhattan.

All of that land gives the yard ample space for its instruments of scrap destruction. Besides the material handlers, front-end loaders and mammoth-sized dump trucks, there is a guillotine shredder that sheers metal into long strips that some smelters prefer. There is a baler that makes tidy cubes out of mounds of tin cans.

And there is also the downstream processor, a massive mill that extracts more metal from materials such as insulated copper wiring that just a few years ago were destined for landfills. Payesko estimates that as a result of such processes, the yard loses just 1.5 to 3 percent of the metal inside objects that come to be scrapped; a decade ago, the loss amount was closer to 30 percent.

?The goal,? he said, ?is to have no loss.?

Peddler yard

Scrap comes to Claremont through a number of channels. One is through the 14 satellite scrap yards that Sims operates in the region, including in Newark. Another is the peddler yard, at the entrance of Claremont, where people pull up in beat-up trucks and vans and sell by the ton broken toasters and bum refrigerators they?ve scavenged from construction sites and trash pick-up routes.

Claremont also employs a commercial group to hunt up new scrap opportunities. One such deal was a contract with New York?s Metropolitan Transit Authority to shred decommissioned subway cars, Payesko said.

Sims generated about $9 billion in revenue for its 2012 fiscal year, which ended last June. While the company does not disclose profits of individual facilities, ?We know that this is (our) most productive facility in the world,? Strechay said of Claremont. ?This facility alone, if you broke it off, would be in the top 25 largest scrap companies in the United States.?

Much of this is thanks to the mega shredder. Installed in 2007, at the cost of about $18 million, the 9,000-horsepower machine is among the most powerful in operation. Of Claremont?s 275 workers, about 30 work on the mega shredder, during one of three shifts each day. The shredder runs largely overnight, when electricity is cheaper. Taking it offline during the day also allows for necessary maintenance. For every hour the shredder is in operation, it needs an hour of repairs, Strechay said.

But it?s no slouch. Hurricane Sandy caused about $4 million of damage to Claremont, Payesko said. But the shredder was back up and running the day after power was restored at the plant. It was later rewarded with a mighty meal. Claremont received about 150,000 to 200,000 tons of additional scrap because of the storm.

Fabled scraps

Bits of history often pass through Claremont. Payesko smiled with some pride as he recalled the 60,000 seats he shredded from Giants Stadium after it came down. Out the wreckage of Yankees Stadium that Sims handled, Payesko saved a ?no pepper games? sign.

Another fine moment was the shredding of ?The Gates,? an oft-ridiculed art installation that, for two weeks in 2005, covered Central Park in saffron-colored drapes.

After scrap passes through the hammer mill, like cheese through a hand-cranked grater, magnets pull off the ferrous material, or the stuff containing iron and steel. This later streams past pickers who pluck out little motors containing copper that steel mills cannot handle.

Meanwhile, the non-ferrous materials ? ranging from aluminum and brass to foam and rubber ? gets trucked off to the downstream processor for further refining.

Shredder pulpit

Watching over the entire process is the shredder pulpit.

A control room perched four stories above ground, it?s manned by a single worker.

Today it?s Jeff Colgan, a shift supervisor. He sits in a chair that Captain Kirk would call home, with 10 screens before him. Each displays a different view of the journey into, and out of, the mega shredder. He keeps watch on two gauges that tell him how hard the machine is running, and he uses a pair of joysticks to control the flow of scrap. Two other screens feed him data.

A mild cacophony fills the room, which trembles constantly under the roar of the mega shredder. Colgan says he can only take a half a shift in the pulpit. Past him, a wall of bulletproof glass offer a view of the mega shredder?s mouth. Billows of steam puff out continuously as hoses spray to keep the machine from overheating or spewing metallic dust.

So much metal disappears so quickly. Slipping by, almost unnoticed, the red sedan heads for reincarnation.

http://www.nj.com/business/index.ssf/ ... _mega_shredder_jerse.html

http://www.courant.com/media/photo/2009-08/48694209.jpg

RECYCLING CLUNKERS
Business Shreds 'Clunkers' Into Scrap Metal
Remnants From 'The Shredder'

A giant pile of steel and iron is all that's left after 'The Shredder' goes to work on cars and other metal products at the Sims Metal Management plant in North Haven.

By ERIC GERSHON The Hartford Courant
August 17, 2009

NORTH HAVEN ? - Whatever headaches consumers, car dealers and auto wreckers must deal with in the "Cash for Clunkers" program, they at least will never face The Shredder.

Most of the clunkers will.

"The shredder is a very destructive animal," said John Sartori, general manager of Sims Metal Management's North Haven scrap recycling facility, which buys crushed cars from junk yards and other suppliers, pounds them to bits and resells the metal to steel mills and smelters worldwide.

One of the main goals of the federal Clunkers program is to get gas-guzzlers off the road forever, so the program requires them to be permanently disabled, a task handled by auto dealers.

But that's just the beginning of the end ? and, really, the rebirth ? of the Ford Explorers, Jeep Cherokees and Dodge Caravans that consumers have been trading in for new Ford Focuses, Honda Civics and Toyota Corollas.

Steel is a recyclable commodity, and most of those old cars will eventually return as something else ? another automobile, perhaps, or a beam in a Shanghai skyscraper or a washing machine in a home in West Hartford. First the clunkers must again become raw steel.

The recycling process typically begins with a wrecker, who buys the disabled car from the auto dealer that made the cash-for-clunker deal. The wrecker typically salvages reusable parts and crushes the frame, then sells it to a scrap yard like the one Sims operates off I-91, near Exit 9.

The cars won't leave Sims resembling anything like an automobile.

"They used to call them 'fragmentizers,'" said Sartori, who has worked at the North Haven scrap yard since 1976. "Now they call them shredders."

Herculean Hammers
By any name, the North Haven shredder, one of 15 that Sims operates in the U.S., and its only one in Connecticut, is a machine to be taken seriously.

Seen from the outside, it brings to mind a giant Rube Goldberg contraption, with towers, slanted chutes, a series of inclined conveyor belts and a powerful magnet for sorting metal types. A crane with raptor-like claws plucks crushed auto bodies from a stack and feeds them into a chute of no return.

Concealed inside is the shredder itself ? a 60,000-pound rotor studded with a series of manganese-alloy hammers spinning at 600 to 650 rpm. These Herculean hammers, which weigh hundreds of pounds each, land rapid-fire blows on the compacted cars, breaking solid bodies into bits of twisted metal.

At the shredder's back end stands a mountain of metal bits that once hurtled down interstates at 65 mph.

In an 11-hour shift, North Haven's shredder can break up more than 1,000 gross tons, or more than 500 mid-size cars.

"And we're a small shredder," said Sartori.

Sims, a publicly traded Australian firm with U.S. headquarters in New York, operates a 9,000-horsepower shredder in Jersey City that is nearly twice as powerful as the North Haven shredder.

The company measures productivity by total tonnage processed, not by type of item, and it could not say how many cars that North Haven processes in a day or year. Also, Sims usually can't distinguish between cars junked through the Cash for Clunkers program and cars junked for other reasons, company spokesman Dan Strechay said.

Still, he said, "We are excited that recycling has been made a key component of the CARS program," referring to the program's official name, the Car Allowance Rebate System.

Worldwide, Sims handled more than 16 million metric tons of material in its 2008 fiscal year, including washing machines, cast-iron radiators, bicycles, and refrigerators, as well as automobiles and non-metals. Sartori estimated that automobiles yield more than 40 percent of the material recycled at the North Haven plant.

China Bound
Although the Cash for Clunkers program appears to be successful by several measures ? more than 330,000 cars have been traded in so far ? most of them haven't made it as far as the scrap yards yet. Many dealers are waiting for reimbursement from the federal government before disposing of the clunkers.

Geoffrey Webster, president of Webster's Used Auto Parts in the Terryville section of Plymouth, said Friday that he expects to pick up 90 clunkers from a single dealership. So far, he's acquired four.

After removing all the tires, batteries, transmissions and other parts that he thinks will resell, Webster plans to sell the remains to a Sims competitor, Schnitzer Steel, which has a metals recycling yard in Providence.

Sims' four yards in Connecticut, including one in Hartford, buy most of their incoming material within the state from wreckers, manufacturing and utility companies and the general public. But, like Schnitzer and other competitors, it casts a wide net.

"We reach out into their area, they reach out into ours," Sartori said during a recent tour of the North Haven yard, where stray springs and seat belt buckles and amorphous hunks of pockmarked metal lay in the dust by the shredder.

The shredder does more than destroy. It also separates ferrous metals, namely iron and steel, from nonferrous metals, such as aluminum, copper and brass, which are processed and sold differently. The more of each item that Sims recycles, the more money it makes.

From the Sims shredder yard, much of the scrap these days goes to Gateway Terminal, a cargo handler on the New Haven waterfront. There the metal is loaded into ships bound for China, Turkey, Greece, Egypt and other places overseas. Sims' North Haven yard even has its own rail tracks and rail cars.

And it has employees who have seen a lifetime's worth of clunkers come and go ? and maybe come back again.

Said Sartori, "I've been doing this since high school."

Copyright ? 2009, The Hartford Courant