May/June 2006
It’s one of scrap recycling’s most persistent problems—how to separate the components of automobile shredder residue and turn them into marketable commodities. VW-SiCon believes it has the solution.
By Theodore Fischer
Worldwide, an estimated 40 million cars and trucks reach their end of life each year, according to the Nickel Institute. By weight, about 70 percent of each shredded vehicle is ferrous metal; another 6 percent is nonferrous metal. With today’s technology, scrap processors routinely capture and recycle those materials—more than three-quarters of every car. What’s left is a potpourri of plastics, polyurethane foam, fabric, rubber, wood, glass, oil, residual metals, and dirt that’s collectively known as shredder fluff. Because of its many and varied components and the likely presence of contaminants, fluff is tough—and expensive—to handle. Consequently, the efficient, economical, legal, and environmentally responsible processing of shredder fluff is the Holy Grail of the automobile recycling industry. Over the years companies have tried—and usually failed—to make it work.
In the United States, fluff disposal is not a pressing problem. Landfill costs are still low, and some landfills even like to use the material as a daily cover. Western Europe is another story, however. There, automobile shredders have some major motivations for finding cost-effective ways to deal with fluff. They face exorbitant landfill fees—as high as $100 to $200 a ton—as well as laws that ban automotive shredder residue from landfills in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and, in 2009, Belgium. Then there’s the European Union’s 2000 End-of-Life Vehicle Directive, which required EU member states to increase their average per-vehicle recovery rate this year to at least 85 percent, of which 80 percent must come from recycling. In 2015, the required minimum recovery rate rises to 95 percent (85 percent by recycling).
What will European recyclers do with all their unwanted fluff? The German engineering firm SiCon GmbH believes it has the answer.
Pint-Sized Fluff-Buster
SiCon is a small company—only six employees—based in the central German town of Hilchenbach, some 60 miles east of Cologne. Managing Director Heiner Guschall got his start processing postconsumer plastics for his family’s small recycling company, Hilchenbacher Rohstoffhandel GmbH. “My brother handled the scrap part, and I was responsible for the waste part,” he says. In 1996, a year after the family firm exited the business, Guschall and partner Guenter Funk founded SiCon, short for Siegen (the German steelmaking region in which Hilchenbach is located) Consulting.
The first venture of the self-styled “Shrednology Company”—“We focus on shredder residues 95 percent of our time,” Guschall says—was a collaboration with DaimlerChrysler (Stuttgart), steel manufacturer Stahlwerke Bremen (a division of Arcelor), and the Bregau-Institute, a Bremen-based research organization, on a small pilot project for processing ASR—just 200 to 400 pounds an hour. Although DaimlerChrysler chose not to move forward with the technology, the project caught the attention of Patrick Craenhals, owner of Belgian Scrap Terminal NV (Antwerp) and a major Hilchenbacher customer. “He came to us and said, 'OK, you can come in with this plan and solve my problem with shredder residues—but you can do it in Belgium,’” Guschall says.
In 1998, Volkswagen invited SiCon and several other companies to devise a system for mechanically processing shredder residue into recyclable materials. Volkswagen gave SiCon the nod, placed a trial order, and a year later established the joint venture VW-SiCon Technology. After years of trials, the first ASR recycling plant using the VW-SiCon process opened in May 2005 in the BST shredder yard in Kallo, Belgium, a deep-sea port north of Antwerp. The BST facility can process nearly 9,000 tons of ASR annually, almost all of it recyclable and much of it profitable.
ASR Solutions
SiCon faced several daunting challenges in recycling shredder residue. “The central problem is the inhomogeneous composition of ASR and MSR,” mixed shredder residues from light commercial scrap and white goods, Guschall says. (In Western Europe, a greater percentage of shredder residue—about 60 percent to 80 percent—is MSR, he notes.) “Furthermore, ASR can have significant impurities that can negatively affect the total process.” Oil is one of the biggest impurities, which means car dismantlers must remove all fluids from ELVs for ASR recovery to work.
Another challenge is creating a process that’s flexible, he says. “Even within Europe there can be completely different market requirements due to the different average sizes of the shredders or different recycling infrastructures.” And there’s the economic challenge of generating products with positive market value.
The VW-SiCon solution? “We split the process into two levels: the main processing and the refining step,” Guschall says. “The main processing step can process any kind of shredder residue with any composition, but it does not produce any final products. Due to precise preclassification, the refining process [can use] adapted machinery to produce final products with defined physical and chemical features.”
The entire process is a series of modules, each of which can be enlarged and adapted for additional processes in the future, such as plastics separation. Created in cooperation with experienced plant builders, the process is completely automated and operates under a detailed management information system.
The process in practice
The BST installation of the VW-SiCon process occupies a brand-new plant in a dockside industrial park alongside the Waasland Canal. When ELVs enter the BST yard, they first go to a shredder for conventional processing. A magnet extracts the iron, and large chunks of rubber, copper reels, and hard plastic are removed manually. SiCon takes the remaining residue—a heterogeneous mixture of odd-sized bits of plastic, rubber, copper, stainless steel, and glass, among other materials—and gets down to business.
In the clean, quiet processing facility, the ASR is placed on a conveyor belt and moves to the pretreatment module, which removes most of the residual ferrous and nonferrous metals. The remaining fluff goes to the main separation module, which uses a combination of mechanical operations—crushing, chopping, hammering, blowing, mixing, and screening—to separate the fluff according to its optical characteristics and physical properties, including density, particle size and shape, magnetic saturation, and electrical conductivity. The fluff components travel through transparent plastic tubes to three refining modules: one each for shredder granules, shredder fibers, and shredder sand. (Optional modules can also treat wastewater and heavy metals.)
By the time the fluff reaches the end of the line, where the newly homogeneous end products drop down into clean trays underneath each of the refining machines, more than 95 percent ofit has been converted into marketable products.
End Products
The VW-SiCon process results in the production of three kinds of refined materials: shredder granules, shredder fibers, and shredder sand.
Shredder granules are a mixture of hard plastics such as polyethylene, polypropylene, ABS, PA, and polyvinyl chloride. “With the plastic separation technology we have integrated into the SiCon process, we get very pure fractions, always based on density,” says Guschall. The technology eliminates the negative impact of gas bubbles and generates a PVC-rich product the Belgian company Solvay can turn into a compound that resembles virgin PVC material. The remaining PVC-poor granules normally become a reducing agent that can substitute at a one-to-one ratio for coal or heavy oil in blast furnaces.
Shredder fibers contain minimal heavy metals and can be densified into a pourable product that final users can adapt to their specific size requirements. They can filter sewage at sludge treatment plants or replace coal in power plants and coke ovens—once densified, the refined fibers have nearly the same caloric value as pulverized coal. And like shredder granules, shredder fibers can serve as reducing agents in blast furnaces.
For the shredder granules and the shredder fibers, “most of those applications have a positive [market] value,” Guschall says, “but the value always depends on the local market—what alternatives the plants have.”
Shredder sand consists mostly of fines with high shares of ferrous oxide, zinc, and lead. One of the two basic uses of shredder sand is as filler in salt mines—EU law requires companies to refill the mines once the salt is extracted. Shredder sand also can be vitrified to form a building material, but the economic value of doing so depends on alternative costs. “For this step we need alternative disposal costs of C60 to C70 per ton; if it’s lower, the step is not affordable,” Guschall says. “Generally, the sand fraction still has a negative value.”
The Road Ahead
SiCon plans to upgrade the BST plant over the next few months, and the company is making inroads throughout Western Europe. “Most of the big European shredder operators are working with us,” Guschall says. A plant in France has adapted the VW-SiCon process to comply with specific French requirements. In Austria, a soon-to-open plant will eventually have a capacity of 70,000 tons a year.
SiCon is also partnering with a waste disposal company on an 80,000 ton-per-year plant in Wiesbaden, Germany, scheduled for completion in the first half of 2007. And Auto Recycling Nederland, the Dutch automobile industry’s network of car dismantling companies, will open a 100,000 ton-per-year plant in the eastern part of the Netherlands in the second quarter of that year.
There have been some bumps in the road, however. In 2004 Volkswagen and Salzgitter AG, a major German steel technology company, announced plans to establish a a20 million joint venture with SiCon called CAR Cycling to construct a 100,000 ton-per-year plant. The plan stalled, however, when questions arose about potential legal exemptions to the German ban on ASR in landfills, which led to concerns about whether sufficient quantities of fluff would be available for the plant.
Even so, long-term prospects are bright for additional applications of the VW-SiCon process, at least in the 15 “traditional” EU countries with tough environmental standards. The 10 newer EU states (many in Eastern Europe) have a grace period before they must adopt those standards. “It is too early to introduce the SiCon technology there,” Guschall says. “In a number of countries where there is a disposal cost of nearly zero, we see hardly any chance for processing and recovering shredder residue.”
SiCon also has made contact with several U.S. shredder operators as well as with the United States Council for Automotive Research, the cooperative research organization of DaimlerChrysler, Ford, and General Motors. Guschall notes that carmakers—Volkswagen, DaimlerChrysler, and others—have been instrumental to SiCon’s progress.
“Without the [research and development] support of auto manufacturers, our process would not have reached its current status,” Guschall says. “In the scrap business, we don’t see a lot of players who are ready to do R&D. Scrap processors are looking for industry-proven technologies with the usual warranties from plant builders.”
SiCon invests heavily in its own research and development as well, both for continuously improving all phases of the process and for developing new recovery possibilities. A new SiCon initiative, ReEnvision, is a gasification process that converts ASR into a hydrogen or diesel fuel called Futroleum.
In the short term, however, SiCon’s biggest challenge is to persuade shredder operators to invest in its ASR recycling system.
“It takes some time before you can convince someone to spend money on something he can usually dispose of in a landfill,” Guschall says. “Our process is economical only in relation to the alternative disposal costs. If landfill costs are only a10 to a20 per ton, then we need a European ordinance with quotas. If there is a ban on [disposing of ASR in landfills] or, as in Switzerland and Austria, rather high disposal costs, companies come to us on their own for a solution.”
Theodore Fischer is a writer based in Silver Spring, Md.
It’s one of scrap recycling’s most persistent problems—how to separate the components of automobile shredder residue and turn them into marketable commodities. VW-SiCon believes it has the solution.