May/June 1999
Global mining and smelting giant Noranda Inc. is also a major recycler of copper and precious metals from electronic scrap as well as lower-grade materials that others might overlook.
By Robert L. Reid
Robert L. Reid is managing editor of Scrap.
Last year, the recycling of copper and precious metals at Noranda Inc. (Toronto) got a promotion, so to speak.
After years of being part of other business units within the giant mining and metallurgical company, the recycling operations were designated as a separate business. The move came as Noranda divested itself of oil, gas, and forestry assets to focus on its core markets, including copper, silver, gold, platinum, and palladium, which together accounted for nearly 40 percent of the firm’s revenue in 1998.
Even after shedding its noncore businesses last year, Noranda remains a huge company, with more than $6 billion in annual sales and roughly 18,000 employees at mines, metallurgical operations, fabricating facilities, and other projects or offices in 20 countries, including three recycling-related facilities in the United States.
In addition to copper and precious metals, Noranda earns much of its revenue from aluminum, nickel, and zinc. Plus, the company plans to launch a major operation in 2000 that should make it one of the world’s leading magnesium producers.
The United States is Noranda’s largest customer, accounting for 56 percent of 1998 sales, followed by Canada at 22 percent and Europe at 13 percent, with the rest split among other countries and regions, according to the firm’s 1998 annual report.
And where does recycling fit in such a global corporate entity?
“It’s our goal to be a premium mining and metals company,” explains Bob Sippel, senior vice president for recycling. “And to be a premier company in that area, the recycling of metals is essential.”
When he joined Noranda more than 20 years ago, Sippel notes, a declining base of mined raw materials in Québec was threatening the viability of the company’s copper smelters there—the Horne facility in Rouyn-Noranda and the Gaspé plant in Murdochville. Indeed, the original copper mine in Rouyn-Noranda that launched the firm in the 1920s had shut down in 1976. But the firm’s copper smelting business survived and grew, thanks to recycling.
“We used recycling as a means of developing alternative feeds, which have been instrumental in keeping those operations economical and strong,” Sippel says. “What we wish to do now is promote the recycling of metals and use our metallurgical assets to expand recycling activities.”
Today, recycled materials represent 15 percent of the feed used at the Horne and Gaspé smelters. By the time the copper anodes produced at those smelters are converted to cathodes, bullion, and other products at Noranda’s CCR refinery in Montréal, the total recycled content equals roughly 10 percent for silver, 20 percent for copper and gold, and as much as 90 percent for platinum and palladium, Sippel notes.
“We take recycling quite seriously,” he asserts, adding that without such recovery measures, the future use of metals in many industrial applications could be jeopardized.
At the Heart of Recycling
Noranda, whose name is a combination of “northern” and “Canada,” began in 1922 as Noranda Mines after prospector Ed Horne discovered a copper deposit that eventually yielded some 60 million mt of ore.
The firm’s first copper recycling efforts started in the 1940s with old shell casings from World War II munitions, but it wasn’t until 1984 that the Horne smelter expanded to include scrap receiving and sampling facilities and installed its first shredding system.
Today, the Horne smelter is described as the heart of Noranda’s recycling efforts. The operation, built over the firm’s original copper mine, is a sprawling industrial complex in northwestern Québec, close to the border with Ontario.
And while the plant itself stretches roughly 1.5 miles long and three-quarters of a mile across, its reach extends even further.
Each year, roughly 140,000 mt of recyclable material from Canada, the United States, and suppliers around the world flows into the Horne smelter’s furnaces. About two-thirds of the material is copper-bearing scrap, while the rest bears precious metals. After processing and sampling, the material is smelted with some 700,000 mt of copper concentrate to cast annually roughly 200,000 mt of copper anodes—large, thin slabs weighing more than 600 pounds apiece.
About 300 to 400 suppliers worldwide ship scrap to the Horne smelter, notes Kevin Weppler, manager of secondary copper markets. Copper scrap comes mostly from U.S. processors east of the Mississippi River. Given the current low copper prices, the material can’t travel much farther without freight costs becoming uneconomical, he says.
But it’s a different story for the precious metal-bearing scrap. With that material potentially worth thousands of dollars a ton, the additional freight costs are less significant, Weppler says. So the Horne smelter receives precious metal scrap from as far away as Europe and Asia, as well as considerable amounts collected by Noranda’s three U.S. sites: Noranda Sampling Inc. in East Providence, R.I., and the two facilities of its electronics recycling unit, Micro Metallics Corp., in San Jose and Roseville, Calif.
Though there’s some crossover of material, the copper scrap comes primarily from generators and nonferrous dealers. You won’t find much clean copper scrap at the Horne smelter, Weppler notes. Instead, Noranda prides itself on handling low-grade material such as turnings, fines, chips, borings, slags, skimmings, residues, and sawings. The highest-value copper scrap the smelter consumes is usually No. 2 or No. 3, he notes.
Precious metal-bearing scrap comes mainly from electronic and photographic sources and can include materials such as keyboards, circuit boards, and monitors, as well as shredded film and X-ray packages from manufacturers, catalysts, and photo lab cartridge residues. The suppliers range from original equipment manufacturers such as Hewlett-Packard and Kodak to a network of collectors and processors of electronics scrap, notes Sippel.
Most scrap, either copper or precious metal-bearing, arrives at the Horne smelter by truck—sometimes as many as 120 a week but currently about 90 due to the market slowdown and low metal prices. Most copper concentrate, in contrast, is shipped in covered railcars. Either way, the winters in Rouyn-Noranda can be so severe that feed material often arrives frozen solid and must be thawed in special heated sheds, says Raymond Lemay, technical representative, customer services, at the Horne smelter.
Noranda melts about 500 mt of recyclables a day, Lemay says, adding that all material received is melted within a few days of arrival in practically a just-in-time system.
Trust and Flexibility
When it comes to using scrap, Noranda prides itself on its flexibility. Unlike a steel mill, for instance, which has rigid requirements regarding impurities in ferrous scrap, the Horne copper smelter can use a wide range of low-grade copper and precious metal-bearing feedstock. And whatever impurities aren’t removed at the Horne smelter, the CCR refinery will catch. Thus, the scrap’s physical characteristics—for example, is it too wet, too dusty, or too large to shred?—can matter more than its chemical composition, Weppler points out.
Noranda has a detailed material evaluation process that covers environmental, health, and safety issues prior to any shipment. In addition, to prevent raw material problems, the Horne smelter has a team of inspectors who examine incoming scrap. These inspectors can even take a digital photo of questionable material or packaging, e-mail it to the supplier, and resolve any questions in a day or two rather than weeks, as was the case when images had to be sent via regular mail, Weppler notes.
Upon arrival, all scrap shipments are weighed and checked for radioactivity. Next, they’re sampled to determine the metal content. (Precious metal recyclables received from Noranda Sampling arrive already sampled, however.)
Certain high-value materials, such as shredded electronics or chopped silver wires, go directly to the carousel-like Noranda Sampler, one of several proprietary pieces of equipment the firm has developed. Other material must be shredded before sampling.
Next, many of the samples are melted in an induction furnace, and the facility’s in-house lab analyzes them to determine their exact composition—a process that can take up to 30 days. While this sampling is being done, the rest of the shipment proceeds through the smelting process.
“It’s a system that requires a great deal of trust between Noranda and its customers over the integrity of the sampling,” explains Paul Healey, superintendent of business.
To resolve any disputes that might arise after-the-fact, Noranda keeps duplicate samples from every shipment stored in a warehouse until assays are finalized. It also allows suppliers to witness the sampling and testing, either by sending one of their own employees or contracting with a third party to represent them.
After the samples are taken, the recyclable material is fed into the Noranda Process Reactor, where it’s combined with copper concentrate and melted at temperatures up to 2,250oF. Silica is added to the mix to help remove iron, while oxygen-enriched air is injected to oxidize sulfur in the concentrate, producing sulfur dioxide.
The sulfur dioxide gas is directed to the Horne facility’s acid plant to be transformed into sulfuric acid—about 500,000 mt last year. (Counting the sulfuric acid produced at other Noranda facilities, Noranda is one of North America’s leading providers of this chemical product.)
The reactor produces a matte of about 70-percent copper and a slag containing roughly 5-percent copper. The slag will be reprocessed through a concentrator and returned to the reactor for a second pass. The matte, meanwhile, moves on to a series of four converters, including a Noranda-designed unit, where further oxidation removes most of the remaining impurities, followed by a final cleaning in the anode furnaces. The smelter’s end product is 99-percent-pure copper, which is then cast in the giant anode wheel. These anodes—about 1,700 a day—are shipped to the CCR refinery, which extracts the precious metals in the anodes en route to producing copper cathodes of 99.9-percent purity.
Minding the Environmental Winds
The Horne smelter runs its continuous process 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year except for two weeks of scheduled maintenance on the Noranda Process Reactor (which involves relining the 70-foot-long cylinder with 22,000 new refractory bricks) as well as the acid plant.
But just because the smelter runs around the clock doesn’t mean it’s always operating full tilt. Strict environmental rules in Québec require the plant to constantly monitor its sulfur dioxide emissions. A series of monitoring devices are located around the town of Rouyn-Noranda, and an intermittent control system (ICS) station was built atop a nearby hill, overlooking the town and the smelter.
Here, Doppler radar, an uninterruptible power source, redundancy of equipment, and continually updated meteorological data help the Noranda environmental team at the ICS station keep constant watch and set production levels at the plant.
Whenever the wind blows too much sulfur dioxide over the town—or when there’s no wind at all, causing the emissions to settle straight down—the ICS team tells the smelter how much to cut back production to stay within required air-quality limits. It’s not a suggestion, explains Robert Bédard, an ICS meteorological technician—it’s an order that must be followed, or else the Québec government will close the plant entirely.
As Weppler puts it, “The ICS has the keys to the smelter.”
Moreover, the ICS sends the smelter a five-day forecast of when to expect cutbacks so it can better manage production by, for instance, scheduling routine maintenance during the environmental downtime, Bédard says. Noranda even publishes an environmental annual report that highlights its ongoing performance regarding air, land, water, and safety and health concerns.
Thinking Globally, Acting Locally
Although international in scope, Noranda tries to maintain close ties with the communities in which it operates. You might say that it has a corporate policy to “Think Globally, Act Locally”—as the popular bumper sticker says.
Noranda’s facilities are often located in remote places, usually making it one of the largest employers in those areas. For instance, in Rouyn-Noranda—a former company town with a current population of 40,000—the Horne smelter has 900 employees. The company—playing its role as a good corporate citizen—built the town a civic arena and golf course. It also turned the area surrounding its hilltop ICS station into a public park.
In addition to maintaining positive relations with its host communities, Noranda is equally focused on ensuring a solid rapport with its thousands of employees.
Most of Noranda’s hourly employees are unionized. At the Horne smelter, it’s CSN, a Québec labor organization, while at the Gaspé plant and CCR refinery, employees belong to the United Steel Workers of America.
Noranda has enjoyed good labor relations for many years, Sippel says, adding that most of its employees enjoy some form of profit-sharing. In return, many have worked to become knowledgeable about various business issues, often providing ideas to make improvements at their particular operation, such as ways to better capture more recyclables. Such employee involvement “has been a significant part of our culture in recent years,” Sippel states.
International Challenges
Although Canada and the United States often boast of having the longest undefended border between two countries, there are administrative challenges to managing a company with assets on both sides of that dividing line (not to mention around the world).
For starters, each country defines hazardous waste differently. Take shredded electronics. Noranda can transport a load of shredded electronics from its Micro Metallics facilities in California across the United States, crossing a half-dozen or more state boundaries, without having to label the shipment as hazardous.
But the minute the material enters Canada, it becomes a hazardous waste and thus must have extra paperwork and different placards, Sippel notes. “The material hasn’t changed physically from the time it was picked up,” he says, “but the classification of it changes.”
Even more frustrating, though, are provisions within the Basel Convention, an international trade treaty, that prevent Canada—which has ratified the treaty—from importing certain scrap from developing nations that haven’t ratified the treaty. “The regulations were put in place to stop hazardous waste from being dumped in developing countries,” Sippel says, “but it has become a means of regulating what used to be normal trade.”
Stressing that he doesn’t oppose environmental regulations per se, Sippel does question the wisdom of preventing Noranda from providing a recycling service to developing countries that don’t have the infrastructure to do it themselves.
“Tell me where that’s saving the environment?” he asks.
Mining New Recycling Niches
In the future, Sippel sees three areas of growth for Noranda’s recycling business, all focused more on precious metals than copper. While Noranda is always interested in copper, he asserts, the amount of copper material available for recycling isn’t increasing as much as other materials.
The firm’s three recycling growth areas are: obsolete electronics; platinum/ palladium from electronics, catalysts, and other metallurgical streams; and contaminated soils from environmental remediation sites.
As part of its push for obsolete electronics, Noranda launched a project with Hewlett-Packard in 1996 that helped build a second facility for its Silicon Valley-based subsidiary, Micro Metallics.
When Noranda purchased Micro Metallics in 1984, the firm had just one location, in San Jose, where it conducts traditional sampling and processing of precious metal-bearing material.
But the new facility in Roseville, which opened in 1996, goes a step further. It disassembles obsolete computer equipment from Hewlett-Packard and a few other computer manufacturers, tests and recovers usable components, and shreds the remaining material for transport to the Horne smelter. Hewlett-Packard and the other computer companies pay Noranda for processing their material.
In return, Sippel says, the manufacturers “can track every pound of material” to ensure that their obsolete equipment doesn’t end up in the wrong market or get illegally dumped in some landfill.
The second growth area—collecting more platinum and palladium from metallurgical streams—builds on Noranda’s expertise in recycling low-grade materials that other companies might overlook.
Likewise, the firm sees potential in recovering the metal content of contaminated soils, which can also contain enough silica to replace the material it currently purchases for its smelting process. Old foundries, smelters, and similar sites being remediated—including Superfund sites—are good sources for this material, which otherwise will continue to end up in landfills, Sippel says.
Finally, Noranda also operates a battery recycling operation in Belledune, New Brunswick, that processed more than 10,000 mt of spent batteries in 1998, collected mainly from Canada’s Atlantic provinces, Québec, and the northeastern United States. This facility is part of Noranda’s lead smelting operation and offers further opportunities for recycling growth. For instance, certain silver-bearing materials are better suited to recovery through lead smelting than copper smelting, Sippel says.
With such a wide range of recycling capabilities, Noranda is poised to enter the new millennium as a major force in metallics recovery. As Paul Healey notes, “Around the world, there really isn’t any company that has the scope to do what we do. Various companies do segments of it, but none does the whole thing.”
And just how confident is Noranda about its future? Consider the great Y2K problem, which has much of the business world worrying that its computers will crash on Jan. 1, 2000.
But where others see doom, Noranda sees opportunity. After all, come Jan. 2, there could be an awful lot of electronic scrap to process. •
Global mining and smelting giant Noranda Inc. is also a major recycler of copper and precious metals from electronic scrap as well as lower-grade materials that others might overlook.