ABOUT THE CLIENT

Colorado Industrial Recycling (CIR - https://coloradoindustrialrecycling.com/) provides recycling services for over 700 companies in the Colorado Springs area. Family owned and operated for three generations, CIR provides cable recycling, roll-off, metal recycling, and steel-for-sale services.

CABLE RECYCLING OBJECTIVE

The Colorado Industrial Recycling team had always received a lot of mixed types of cable scrap, which they previously shipped out internationally for cable recycling. They had been considering expanding their capabilities to process cable in-house with their own plant and equipment. CIR were looking for a cable recycling solution that would be efficient, environmentally conscious, and help them to improve their profitability. In 2017 CIR placed an order for a cable recycling solution from ELDAN. In 2018 ELDAN installed a full-scale cable recycling plant with primary and secondary shredding, granulation, and sorting of both metal and plastic fraction to ensure minimum metal loss.

CABLE RECYCLING SOLUTIONS

The CIR team met ELDAN Recycling at a tradeshow and learned of their goals of cable recycling with their own plant. After the trade show, ELDAN reached out to CIR to see how they were progressing with their project and invited them to visit two of their existing processing plants. The CIR team also visited several other wire processing plants from other providers but observed that the ELDAN equipment would produce a higher quality product with fewer machines. The ELDAN team recommended a solution that would handle the cable and wire processing volumes required by CIR. They discussed the equipment specifications that would handle the desired daily volume. The CIR team then evaluated the size of the facility that would work best for their needs.

RESULTS

ELDAN’s cable recycling plant provided CIR with a solution that is both environmentally friendly and profitable for their cable recycling. This added capability has allowed CIR to stop shipping their cables to other recyclers and created new business and revenue opportunities for cable processing in-house.

CIR has been able to measure success by:

1. Expanding their capabilities to process cable in-house
2. Increasing metal recovery
3. Keeping the number of operators required to a minimum

Metal recovery have been close to 99% for many types of cable and new business opportunities are continually emerging for CIR due to this added capability. The equipment also requires only 2 people to operate. Due to the low energy consumption and efficiency of the plant, CIR has been able to process cable profitably rather than shipping it out internally for processing.

Reusing as many materials as possible is increasingly important as resources are depleted faster every year. Investing in a plant that ensures a minimal metal loss will thus not only ensure a higher profit for the recycler, it also helps keep as many resources as possible in the material circle. And since metal can be reused in new products many times, it is a perfect material from a circular economy point of view.