Innovation in Action – ERS News & Projects

Part 5 closes our series on how to choose a scrap shear with the electronics, the part that now does more and more of the work.

Lasers instead of mechanical limit switches. Lasers control the stroke of the clamp and the shear, so the machine runs with fewer moving parts to adjust.

Encoders on the lid cylinders. Linear or rotary encoders track the lids and smooth out pressure peaks and shocks.

Sensors in the feed cylinder. Lasers and proximity sensors built into the cylinder control the feed stroke.

Transducers for pressure, temperature and filters. They take the place of mechanical pressure switches and report filter clogging, all on an operator panel where the working parameters are set.

A control program built on experience. The software that runs a shear well comes from years of work and testing.

The conclusion of the whole series: tell what costs from what is truly worth its price. A shear chosen with care may cost more on day one, and it keeps its value for years, for you and for the next owner.

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.

Read the previous part: Part 4, the hydraulic system.

Part 4 of our series on how to choose a scrap shear goes inside the hydraulic system. It turns installed power into cutting force, and it decides how the shear behaves when the scrap gets tough.

Piston pumps for the main work. Constant-power piston pumps carry the load, and only the service pumps are anything else. With constant-power control the shear slows down and pushes harder as resistance rises, so it needs less installed power and less energy per ton cut.

Filtration at every stage. Air filters on the tank, pressure filtration on the pilot circuit, filtration on the return line and an independent filtration circuit. Filters cost far less than a pump.

A clean, accessible power unit. Few pipes, flexible hoses only where they are needed, and valves grouped on distribution panels that combine spool valves with 2-way cartridge elements. Easy to read and easy to service.

Higher working pressure. 240 bar (3,500 psi) was once considered extreme. Today 350 bar (5,100 psi) is the standard, and TAURUS runs at 420 bar (6,100 psi). Higher pressure means smaller oil volumes, a more compact system and lower building and maintenance costs.

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.

Read the previous part: Part 3, the compression box. Part 5, the electronics, follows next.

ERS is on the floor at CEBNA 2026 in Atlanta, booth 512, through 29 October. A home show for us: the ERS test facility is a short drive from the hall, so a conversation at the booth can turn into a trial on your own material.

ERS is at the E-Scrap Conference in New Orleans this week, booth 406. Electronic scrap, shredding, milling and density separation. If you want to know what your own material will actually do, we run it at our test facility in Atlanta. Come and talk it through with us.

There is no point in a 1,000-ton shear if the pre-compression box cannot crush what that force is meant to cut. Part 3 covers honeycomb construction, overstroke on both lids, and the box cross-sections that match the cutting force.

ERS is exhibiting at CEBNA 2026, the Critical Minerals, Battery Recycling and E-Waste World Expo, booth 512. A home show for us: ERS and our test facility are both in Atlanta.

ERS is exhibiting at the E-Scrap Conference 2026 at the Hyatt Regency New Orleans, booth 406. Jeff Wair and Mark Haire are on the stand to talk through your feed material — mixed boards, cable, power supplies and fines.

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-center.

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 aluminum 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 center of it. Steel, aluminum, copper and fiber 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 air 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.