Innovation in Action – ERS News & Projects

A metals separation line upgrade inside a working plant is mostly a sequencing problem. New conveyors, new separators and new electrical have to go in around equipment that is still earning money, in a building that was laid out for something else.

On this one ERS added a full separation stage: an eddy current separator, high-speed classification, screening, and more than a dozen conveyors — HSCS infeed, heavies and waste, screen overs and fines, zorba, and the ferrous discharge and waste lines — each with its own stands, chutes and transfer points.

What the drawings said and what the site allowed were not the same. Two cross-beams for the separator frame arrived fabricated wrong and were cut to size on site. Mounting brackets on the support beams did not line up with the conveyor holes, so new holes were drilled. The zorba conveyor, set exactly to drawing, left a three-inch gap to the separator frame. Ground had to be flattened and packed before the telehandler could reach the waste conveyors — and at one point it was stuck in the mud.

None of that is remarkable. It is what a retrofit is. The question is only whether the crew can fabricate, re-drill and re-route on site without the schedule moving, and whether someone is keeping the whole sequence in their head while the electricians work alongside them.

That is the part ERS carries. Metals processing systems, engineered, installed and commissioned as one line — including into plants that are already running.

A scrap system installation is only partly about the equipment. The rest is what you find when you walk into the building.

At a corrugated plant in Nevada, ERS was installing a complete line — shredder, baler, separator tower, filter and the duct that ties them together. On day one the crew found that the column the layout was referenced from was buried inside a wall, the drawing scale was wrong so nothing could be measured off it, and the support legs sat 12.5 inches away from where the footing drawing put them.

Every layout on the floor had to move 12.5 inches in one direction before anything could be anchored.

It did not stop there. The filter sat higher than its standard adjustable feet allowed, so taller feet had to be ordered. The electrical plan put the control panel where two sub-panels and a transformer already stood. And the site would have no permanent power for three months.

The crew worked around all of it: shims and anchors set to the corrected elevation, the platform and handrail built out, the filter and return air fan laid out, the separator lid match-drilled and fitted on site.

This is the part of a project that never appears in a quotation. Equipment arrives to a specification. Buildings do not. Dust collection and scrap handling systems get commissioned on time because the people installing them can re-measure, re-order and re-route without waiting for a new drawing set.

Part 2 of our series on how to choose a scrap shear goes inside the shear itself. It is the most punished part of the machine, and the part that decides what you spend on maintenance for the next twenty years. New, they all look up to the job. Time is the real judge.

Two cutting cylinders, not one. Twin cylinders balance the cutting system, cut contact friction and improve the piston guiding ratio for the same frame size. They also come out one at a time — a small cylinder is far easier to pull than a large one.

The guide ratio. Guide length to cutting width should be greater than 1.5. Below that, stress concentrates on the guides and the blade holder, and both wear out early. Six-sided prismatic guides, precision machined, spread the cutting forces into the structure and make adjustment simpler.

Synthetic on hardened steel. Dust particles embed in the plastic instead of seizing the guide, and the guides are self-lubricating. Steel on steel and bronze on steel are obsolete.

The blade angle. Reputable builders stay between 7° and 10°, with 9° to 10° the right compromise. Past 10°, the small gain in cutting capacity goes straight back out as friction and wear. Near 12°, material is driven against the shear wall and loads the blade holder off-centre.

The one to walk away from: welded guides, or no interchangeable wear plates on the surfaces that touch the scrap. Cheaper to buy, far more expensive to own.

ERS partners with TAURUS in the U.S. for shear balers and inclined shears, and engineers the feed, separation and dust collection around them as one line.

Parts 3 to 5 follow weekly.

ERS designs and builds e-waste recycling systems in the United States, and the question we are asked more than any other is what one actually consists of.

It is five stages, not one machine.

Shredding reduces whole devices — towers, drives, boards — to a controlled particle size. Fines removal screens out the small, high-value fraction before it is lost downstream. Metal separation takes the ferrous out magnetically, then aluminium and mixed metals by eddy current. Density separation splits the remaining metal from plastic. Dust collection handles the fine, abrasive dust the process generates, which on electronics is a safety question, not housekeeping.

Get the sequence wrong and material leaves the building as mixed scrap at a mixed price. Get it right and every fraction leaves as a clean, saleable product.

The picture above is typical incoming material: boards, RAM, hard drives, small motors, power supplies and cable. Each one needs a different route through the line.

ERS engineers the whole line for processors across the US and Canada — feed, shredding, separation and dust collection as one system, from one supplier.

Friday 2 October is National Manufacturing Day, and recycled material sits at the centre of it. Steel, aluminium, copper and fibre recovered in this country go straight back into American production.

None of that happens on its own. ERS builds the equipment behind two industries, and neither of them runs without it.

In scrap and metals recycling, we design and install the separation lines that pull clean metal out of mixed material — feed, shredding, milling, air density tables, metal separation and dust collection, engineered as one line.

In paper and paper converting, we build the trim removal, vacuum transfer dust collection and scrap system dust collection that keep high speed machines running and the plant clean.

Both photographs above are our own crews partway through an install: a metals separation line on top, a paper dust collection system below. Not renders, not brochure shots. That is the work, and the people doing it are why the equipment is still running twenty years later.

ERS builds and installs complete scrap processing lines across the United States and Canada, and the question we are asked more than any other is how to pick the scrap shear at the centre of one. So we are publishing a five-part series on how to choose a scrap shear.

Part 1 starts where most buying decisions do not: the manufacturer. True shear manufacturers are few. Does the supplier have the size, the machine tools and the structure to build one? Go and see where your money is going.

Requirements have moved. Only a few years ago a 300-ton machine with a 600 mm blade and a 5-metre box was standard. Today 500 tons is considered small, the blade is never shorter than 800 mm, and pre-compression boxes run 6 to 7 metres with an opening over 2.4 m — the width of a truck bed.

The reason is the material. Clean collected scrap and end-of-life vehicles increasingly go elsewhere, leaving the shear the tough, bulky, structural work. Quality of the sheared product now matters more than tonnage. A shear is expected to give at least 20,000 hours of honest service.

ERS partners with TAURUS in the U.S. for shear balers and mobile scrap processing equipment, and engineers the feed, separation and dust collection around them as one line.

Parts 2 to 5 follow weekly: design and construction, the shear, the pre-compression box, and the hydraulic and control system.

ERS is exhibiting at Southeast ReMA Connect 2026 in Birmingham, Alabama, September 28 to 30. You will find us at booth 19.

Southeast ReMA brings the regional recycling community into one room, which makes it a good place to have the conversation that actually matters: what your material is, and what a line built around it would recover.

Jeff Wair is on the stand for all three days, so bring the awkward questions. Mixed streams that will not separate cleanly. A shredder that stalls on the difficult loads. Copper still sitting in the reject fraction. Dust nobody has properly captured.

ERS designs and builds metals recovery systems rather than selling machines in isolation. Feed and conveying, shredding and milling, separation, dust capture and the baler at the end are engineered as one line, and supported by the same team afterwards.

Stop by booth 19 and tell us what your material stream looks like. If it is worth testing properly, we will run a sample through the ERS test facility in Atlanta and show you the result.

Corrugated Week 2026 is running this week at the Fort Worth Convention Center, and ERS is on the floor at booth 633.

Every box plant produces trim and dust continuously, and all of it has to leave the machine without interrupting production. Handle one part of that chain well and the weakest link still sets the pace.

ERS builds the complete system. Trim removal at the die cutter, printer and slitter. Vacuum transfer moving material across the plant through ducted lines. Scrap collection and separation feeding the baler. And dust collection and filtration at the end of it.

Because it is engineered as one system, the filtration side can be specified to be OSHA and NFPA compliant with no abort gates and no explosion vents, which changes the ducting, the wall penetrations and the clearance zones a combustible dust installation normally demands. Self-cleaning every two to three minutes, with no compressed air required.

The floor is open Tuesday 12:00 to 5:00 and Wednesday 12:00 to 4:00. Mike Carver and Michael Carver are on the stand both days.

Engineered Recycling Systems is exhibiting at Corrugated Week 2026 in Fort Worth, Texas, September 28 to 30. You will find us at Booth 633.

Corrugated Week puts the whole converting industry in one building, which makes it the right place to talk about the part of the plant that rarely gets designed properly: what happens to the trim after the machine has made the cut.

We are on the stand for all three days. Bring the problems you have stopped expecting anyone to solve. Trim that chokes the system on the heavy grades, a fan that has never quite kept up since the line was sped up, ductwork that was extended one machine at a time, a baler that cannot keep pace at full production.

ERS designs and builds complete trim removal systems rather than selling machines in isolation. Cutters and hoods at the machine, ducting and dust collection, the separator, and the baling system at the end are engineered as one line and supported by the same team afterwards.

Stop by Booth 633 and tell us what your line runs. If it is worth looking at properly, we will work through the numbers with you.

Insulated wire and cable is one of the few scrap streams where the value is obvious and the difficulty is in getting at it. The copper is worth recovering. The insulation has to come off cleanly, and whatever the process leaves behind is money still sitting in the tailings.

Guidetti chop lines are built for exactly that. The Sincro series takes insulated wire and cable through granulation and separation and delivers clean copper granulate, with models scaled from smaller in-house recovery volumes right up to continuous production. What separates one line from another is not whether it produces copper, it is how much copper stays in the reject stream.

That is where the back end of the line matters. The Sincro Mill Line and Reco Mill Line go after copper still bound up in plastic tailings after the first pass. Dry separation tables then sharpen final purity without adding water to the process, which keeps the output saleable and the plant dry.

Ahead of the chop line, PMG pre-shredders break bulky and mixed material down to a size the granulation stage can take without choking. Sized from the PMG 400 through to the PMG 1600, with hydraulic variants where the feed is heavier, they are what keeps a line running at rate instead of stalling on the awkward loads.

ERS supplies the full Guidetti range across the United States and builds it into engineered systems rather than selling machines in isolation. That means feed and conveying, dust capture at the transfer points, separation interfaces, controls, and service after commissioning, designed as one thing and supported by the same team afterwards.

Every material stream behaves differently, and two plants running what looks like the same wire can see very different recovery rates. If you want to know what a Guidetti line would actually recover from your material, send us a sample and we will run it through the ERS test facility in Atlanta and show you the result before you commit to anything.

Imported car body parts reach North American assembly and logistics operations on racks built from structural steel. The racks protect hoods, doors, fenders and side members in transit and let the load be handled through distribution centers. They do their job well, and then they reach the end of their service life.

At that point they become one of the more awkward materials in the yard. End-of-life transport racks have an open geometry, they are rigid, and they come in a range of sizes that never stack neatly. The result is bulky steel scrap with very low density, taking up far more space than its tonnage justifies and costing time every time it is moved. Processing it usually means cutting or breaking racks down by hand before anything else can happen.

ERS approaches steel transport rack recycling by removing that manual step. The MIZAR baler, which ERS supplies in North America as a partner of TAURUS, takes this material directly. Its compression chamber measures 1000 x 600 mm, roughly 39 by 24 inches, and is built in a tank shape with two flat swinging lids hinged to each other. The lower lid is hinged longitudinally to the vertical wall of the chamber, which grips awkward material more steadily and holds it in place through the cycle instead of letting it spring back. Every inner surface in contact with the scrap is thick wear-resistant steel plate.

Compression force is what makes the difference on rigid material. The MIZAR can be specified with three cylinders per lid, giving each lid a maximum of 300 tons, matched by the feed cylinder. That is enough to fold and consolidate structural steel scrap in one pass rather than working it repeatedly.

The result shows up immediately in the yard. Initial volume drops by 70 to 80 percent, and loose, snagging rack sections become compact, regular bales that stack and travel. Scrap volume reduction on that scale changes the logistics as much as the storage: fewer trips, fuller loads, and a consistent product going out to the mill. Fast cycle times mean large quantities move in a short working day.

If steel racks, frames or other rigid structural scrap are piling up faster than you can move them, talk to ERS about what a line built around that specific material would look like.