January/February 1990
… at Franklin Smelting & Refining Corp., which for more than 60 years has been converting scrap with low percentages of copper into valuable 98-percent-pure copper cakes. Essential to the operation: the right “recipe” in the furnace and trust in and from a broad base of scrap suppliers.
By Elise R. Browne
Elise R. Browne is managing editor of Scrap Processing and Recycling.
You may not think of Philadelphia as a copper mining town, but Milton Schwab knows differently. The president of Franklin Smelting & Refining Corp. compares his company's operations to those of an ore miner: "A miner of copper ore concentrates the ore up to about 30-percent copper, then smelts the concentrate and performs extractive metallurgy to make blister copper, which is 98-percent pure. We have no ore, but we take anything from the scrap field, whether it has 10-percent copper or 35-percent copper or any percentage of copper, and we smelt it and perform extractive metallurgy to produce the same thing, blister copper. In effect, while the miner of ore is mining the mine below the ground, which depletes itself, we are mining a mine above the ground, which is always replenishing itself."
Franklin's "mine" extends well beyond its 15-acre plant in Philadelphia to the facilities of approximately 700 scrap processors located throughout the United States and Canada. From these processors Franklin buys all types of copper-containing scrap-from copper-bearing dust to resistors to out-of-circulation coins to electronic scrap-and turns it into blister copper. The key to refining these diverse materials (most of which contain low percentages of copper) into nearly pure copper, according to Daniel Schwab, Milton's nephew and a company principal, is a combination of using the right mix of materials, processing the scrap to a uniform size, and smelting the processed materials through a series of furnaces employing specific environmental controls. Franklin's processing equipment includes two Harris guillotine shears, a Harris baler, and a briquetter.
"We need to have the right recipe of materials or the process is not going to work," explains Danny. What's the right recipe? A proper mixture of coarse and fines, of iron and copper, of high-grade and low-grade materials, and of slags and skimmings. To ensure that the company has all the ingredients it needs, Franklin maintains a large inventory of materials, which it obtains by sticking to a philosophy of always being in the marketplace and purchasing large quantities and diverse qualities of scrap materials.
Making Knowledgeable Purchases
The other step Franklin takes to ensure that it has the right ingredients for its recipe is to buy its scrap based on the percentage of copper it contains. The company encourages its customers to know the copper content of the materials they're selling and even teaches them how to analyze their scrap. Franklin's sampling and assaying department, however, is vital to company operations. "If we are offered material that runs 50-percent copper, we can't afford to pay for 50-percent copper and find that it runs 40-percent copper. On the other hand, if it runs 60-percent copper, the customer deserves to get paid for the extra 10 percent," Danny explains.
Because the company puts so much emphasis on scrap analysis, it puts a great deal of effort into its sampling procedures. According to Michael Saltzburg, another Franklin principal who's also Milton's nephew, Franklin adheres to the principle that appears on its logo, "Efficient sampling plus careful assays equals good returns."
"If the initial steps aren't done properly," he says, "you can have the best lab in the world and it wouldn't make a difference." Putting such attention on sampling procedures may be time consuming, but, notes Milton, "Over the years customers have learned they can trust our reports. They're going to get what they want, which is accurate results."
Maintaining that trust and forging friendships with scrap processors is vital to Franklin's business since it always is seeking more materials. That's one reason the company buys almost exclusively from scrap processors. "We've never been a company to cut the scrap dealer out from his industrial sources," says Danny. "We hardly ever go directly to the source."
Precious Telephone Scrap
There is an exception to that rule: part of the 4,000 to 5,000 tons of materials Franklin purchases every month is telephone switch gear, which is bought directly from local and regional telephone companies across the country. The gear is an ideal item for Franklin's operation since it contains many of the metals needed for its furnace recipe: the switch gear is comprised mainly of iron and copper and the contacts are made of precious metals-gold, silver, and palladium. And Franklin is an ideal recycler for the switchgear since it is able to smelt all components of the gear without stripping it apart. Although most of the non-copper metals put in the furnace are volatilized and oxidized out of the mix by the time the end product is poured, precious metals are retained, making the blister copper that much more valuable.
The switchgear becomes scrap as digital equipment is installed in its place throughout the United States, a replacement scheme that should be completed by the mid- to late 1990s, according to Danny. Franklin also is developing and expanding its use of higher-grade types of precious metals. Thus, an alternative to telephone scrap for the future is to take in a lower volume of items that have a higher percentage of precious metals.
Looking to the Future
What else lies ahead for Franklin? According to Mike, the next five years will see the company doing basically the same thing it's doing now, only better, perhaps with more capturing of the other nonferrous metals in its mix. However, he says, most of the company's future growth likely will be in the volume of copper-bearing and precious metal scrap handled.
The company is ready for that growth thanks to improvements it's made to the efficiency of its operations. In the last 10 years, Mike explains, Franklin has "put a lot of capital and a lot of know-how into the efficiency of the plant" in preparation for increasing its capacity and environmental control. The focus on environmental improvement is vital, he notes, because "it goes hand in hand with production. You can't separate the two." Among the environmental enhancements the company has made to its operations are modifications to the five baghouses installed over its furnaces to make them more efficient at cleaning the air and installation of secondary protection equipment designed to take over in case of a primary-device failure.
In addition to making environmental improvements, the company has installed two operations in the last decade that have enabled it to grow and prepare for the future. The first is a totally automated liquid-oxygen-making plant that provides the oxygen for two of the company's proprietary processes-the inverted bosch blast furnace and the pure oxygen and gas converter furnaces. The other new operation has given Franklin an increased material-handling capability. Very fine materials are screened out of the scrap, squeezed into briquettes, and added to the mix in desired proportions. Without this operation, according to Milton, the fines would be blown out of the furnace, and Franklin couldn't purchase them.
More recently, the company installed a computer system with custom software to track all of its purchasing, sampling, payments, and material-handling controls. Danny says he's already seen how the system has improved efficiency and expects to soon expand it into inventory and metallurgical operations.
Smelting and Refining
Franklin's furnace processes are, according to Mike, "vertically integrated--you go step by step until you get copper." The prepared and processed mix of materials is placed in an inverted bosch blast furnace (designed and patented by Milton) where it is upgraded from 30-percent copper to 80-percent copper. That semirefined product is transferred to the company's patented reverberatory holding furnace, which keeps the mix in a liquid form while slag is tapped off the top. The resulting product is poured into a ladle that's transferred along a short rail. An overhead crane then lifts the ladle and pours its contents into one of two oxygen converter furnaces, where the molten metal is further refined to 98-percent copper and is poured into blister cakes weighing 2,000 to 5,000 pounds each.
Recycling By-Products, Too
The smelting of 250 to 300 tons of scrap every day results in a large volume of byproducts. Converter slag, which runs between 35- and 40-percent copper and is produced from the actual pouring of blister cakes, can be reused. Another slag produced by the blast furnace operation is sold as an abrasive material. And the metallic oxides collected by the baghouses over the furnaces are sent for recycling domestically and overseas. The fact that all of these byproducts are reused is important to Franklin. "We're a recycling business and everything we have is recyclable," says Danny. "So it's put to use one way or another."
The main reason the company is in business, however, is to produce blister cakes. Approximately 1,500 tons per month of this product are shipped via common carrier to an electrolytic refinery. At that Canadian refinery, the blister copper is further refined to pure copper.
Copper in the Family
The Schwab family has been involved with copper smelting since before Franklin Smelting & Refining was started more than 60 years ago. In 1911, Milton's father, Louis, became a principal in a company that was later incorporated as Girard Smelting and Refining Company. When Milton graduated from college in 1935, he and his father started Franklin, which is named not after anyone in the family, but Benjamin Franklin. Mike, who says he thought he wanted to work for the family business as early as his days in high school, worked for the company part-time during college and made the arrangement permanent after receiving a masters degree in business administration in 1967. Danny also worked at Franklin during college; he began full-time work at Franklin in 1979, a year after graduation. The family interest in metals extends beyond these three company principals. Milton's brother, Albert, is president of MDC Industries, Philadelphia, which handles the abrasive slag Franklin produces.
While running a family-owned business has certain idiosyncrasies that can manifest themselves as problems, Mike says he believes being a closely held family business has been helpful to Franklin and its 175 employees. "For good people," he explains, "there are probably more opportunities here than in a large, bureaucratic corporation." Herbert Bowman and Dick McKillop, nonfamily staff members who work in the purchasing end of the business, see Franklin's family management and business approach as advantageous to its customers, as well. Just by its very nature, this company can be much more flexible in dealing with the scrap trade, they explain, than can a publicly held company.
"We try to be flexible," adds Danny. "We want to accommodate people, within reason, whenever we can. I think that's one of the reasons we have such an excellent reputation. It's something we've always prided ourselves on." Mike agrees, noting that flexibility is vital to Franklin's business. "We provide an outlet for all types of low-grade copper scrap," he says. "A lot of these items are difficult to recycle, but it just takes energy and know-how to get them recycled into copper--which is what we're here to do."
Tapping Unique Market
Flexibility has translated into a niche market for Franklin. According to Milton, "there are not many companies in the world that do what we do, in the fashion that we do it, in this plant." Others handle segments of the types of materials Franklin consumes, he says, "but mostly as an adjunct to ore smelting."
Copper is difficult to substitute, so it's never going to disappear, Danny says. As the mine above the ground continues to produce, Franklin's processes will be flexible enough to recycle all grades of copper-bearing scrap, he notes, no matter what form they take in the future.•
… at Franklin Smelting & Refining Corp., which for more than 60 years has been converting scrap with low percentages of copper into valuable 98-percent-pure copper cakes. Essential to the operation: the right “recipe” in the furnace and trust in and from a broad base of scrap suppliers.