January/February 1998
By Robert L. Reid
Robert L. Reid is Managing Editor of Scrap.
Here’s a look at how RSR Corp.’s Middletown, N.Y., subsidiary recycles potentially hazardous lead-acid batteries in a safe and environmentally sound way.
Who Is RSR?
RSR Corp. was formed in 1970 when Howard Meyers, Al Lospinoso, and John DePaul bought Revere Smelting and Refining Corp. of New Jersey (hence the RSR initials), a small lead company in Newark, N.J. After expanding into Middletown, Dallas, Indianapolis, City of Industry, Calif., and Seattle, the company issued public stock, then became privately held again in 1984.
RSR, which has since sold its Newark, Dallas, and Seattle locations, is now a subsidiary of Dallas-based Quexco Inc., which was formed by RSR’s executives as a holding company for their worldwide operations. In addition to its U.S. operations, the Quexco family of lead companies includes a lead smelter and rolling mill in England, a primary lead smelter and two recycling facilities in Germany, a lead smelter and rolling mill in France, as well as recycling facilities in Austria and Italy.
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The next time your car battery dies on a snowy morning or konks out on a sweltering summer day, you’d probably love to break it into pieces and throw them into a red-hot furnace, wouldn’t you?
Well, take heart. That’s roughly the fate that awaits all old batteries when they arrive at the Revere Smelting and Refining Corp. (RSR) secondary lead smelter in Middletown, N.Y. (RSR is a subsidiary of Dallas-based RSR Corp.). Of course, breaking up old batteries is just the first step in a process that eventually recycles the raw materials into new batteries. It’s a kind of economic alchemy that turns lead into ... well, maybe not gold. Not at today’s lead prices. But it’s certainly a business in which RSR wants to lead the way.
According to Malcolm Nordstrom, senior vice president of commercial operations, “RSR is committed to being ahead of the curve” in all aspects of lead smelting, from productivity and efficiency to safety and environmental compliance.
Over a 17-year period, for instance, the company reduced its work force from 1,400 to 700 employees and reduced the number of plants operated by its subsidiaries from five to three—Middletown, Indianapolis, and City of Industry, Calif. Yet over the same period, RSR increased its annual output from 150,000 tons of secondary lead to 300,000 tons. And this year, it expects to produce 320,000 tons—an estimated 20,000 tons more than its nearest competitor.
Likewise, RSR has spent more than $100 million on plant improvements in the past five years, with most of the money going toward environmental compliance and controls designed to put the company “ahead of where you’re required to be today,” Nordstrom says.
This tour of the firm’s Middletown operation shows how it works its modern-day lead alchemy.
Beaucoup Batteries
RSR’s Middletown plant recycles all types of lead-acid batteries, including automotive batteries (also known as SLIs for starting, lighting, and ignition), uninterruptible-power-supply batteries (standby batteries that kick in during emergencies, such as when a computer or phone system’s regular power source is cut off), and large steel-case batteries used in forklifts. The plant even recycles the behemoth batteries that power submarines.
Currently, RSR receives about half of its batteries from battery manufacturers via tolling arrangements in which it recycles both the lead and plastic in the batteries for a fee, returning each commodity to the manufacturer. The manufacturers gather batteries through a nationwide network of collection centers at retail stores, where people drop off spent car batteries when they come in to buy replacements. Manufacturers then pick up the old batteries when they deliver new ones.
Scrap processors and battery distributors account for the other half of RSR’s supply, collecting batteries from individual car owners and auto dismantlers and selling them to RSR for recycling and sale on the open market. RSR buys from thousands of scrap suppliers across the country, including Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico, Nordstrom says. Some are major players, sending 10 to 15 truckloads of batteries a month, while others generate only a single truckload in the same period.
RSR used to receive about 70 percent of its batteries from scrap processors, Nordstrom says. But over the years, many processors stopped accepting batteries given the environmental risks involved. At the same time, battery manufacturers gained control of more of the scrap battery stream as they started their own collection systems.
RSR’s current practice of sourcing half its batteries from manufacturers and half from processors has its pros and cons. When secondary lead prices are low to moderate, it’s more profitable to toll material, whereas “when lead is 40 cents a pound, we’d rather be selling it all,” Nordstrom says. “Obviously, you can’t have it all one way or the other all the time, so on average we try to balance it half-and-half.”
Getting the Lead Out
All batteries arrive at the Middletown plant on trucks, most carrying a thousand or more SLIs per load. The site also receives some production scrap by rail. This scrap includes lead-bearing material produced during battery manufacturing, such as spent plates—metallic grids pasted with lead oxide—and a runoff of excess lead oxide and water called “mud.” In addition, the facility accepts higher-grade scrap such as lead-covered cables, acid-tank linings, and lead counterweights.
The Middletown plant, which operates around-the-clock, seven-days-a-week, rarely keeps more than a two-day inventory of uncrushed batteries on hand. SLI batteries are unloaded straight from the trucks onto a conveyor that feeds them into the battery wrecker, an aptly named machine that features a large revolving drum studded with stainless steel teeth. The drum’s teeth mesh with a similar set of metal molars on a breaker bar to reduce batteries into tiny bits of lead and plastic.
Lead-acid batteries smaller than SLIs must be processed separately to ensure proper chopping, while giant submarine batteries—which stand 5 feet tall—must be disassembled by hand. Likewise, steel-case forklift batteries, which are about the size of a short bookcase, must first be “shucked,” a process in which a hydraulic hammer on a backhoe is used to remove the steel casing. The 30-inch battery cells can then be fed into the wrecker just like SLIs, while the spent steel cases are sold to a scrap processor.
After passing through the wrecker, the chopped-up battery and plastic stream is conveyed to a water-based process where the heavier lead sinks to the bottom, separating itself from the lighter plastic, which floats to the top. The plastic pieces—virtually all of which are polypropylene—are then washed and tested for leachable lead residue before being blown into a truck trailer. A scrap plastic processor accepts this material, chops it further, pelletizes it, and—in the case of tolling accounts—returns it to the original battery manufacturer to be made into new battery cases.
At this point, it no longer matters whether the lead-bearing material came from a large or small battery, so it’s all stored together in mountainous piles in an environmentally state-of-the-art containment room. When the material is ready to be smelted, front-end loaders feed great mounds into the hopper that leads to a rotary kiln, a revolving drum-type dryer with a flame at one end.
After being dried in the kiln, the lead-bearing material moves into Middletown’s reverberatory furnace, a gas-fired, oxygen-enriched brick box that smelts the metal. The molten lead then flows down toward the plant’s four alloying kettles in a continuous process. Again, the heavier lead-bearing material sinks down while lighter material—the lower-lead slag—floats off. Slag is stored briefly in the containment room, then shipped to either RSR’s Indianapolis or City of Industry plant, where an electric-arc furnace turns this byproduct into a high-antimony material used to alloy new lead products in kettles.
The Middletown plant produces three lead products: pure lead; calcium lead (an alloy of calcium and aluminum or calcium, aluminum, and tin); and antimonial lead (an alloy of lead, tin, antimony, and arsenic). Antimonial lead is a physically harder product that helps create the rigidity needed for battery grids, Nordstrom explains. Calcium lead and pure lead are prime materials for SLI batteries, which don’t need to be recharged as fully as antimonial lead batteries, such as those used in golf carts.
Middletown reserves two of its alloying kettles for casting—one for antimonial lead and the other for either pure lead or calcium lead. The other two kettles are used for treating and refining, including a series of chemical and oxidation treatments in 140-ton batches for pure or calcium lead and 75-ton batches of antimonial lead.
To ensure that its recycled lead meets customer specifications, RSR tests the metal throughout the alloying process. “We take a sample when the metal enters the kettle and then another series of samples as we treat it, and after each treatment we take another sample to see where we are,” Nordstrom says. “Before we cast it, we pour a sample, test it, test the molten metal as it’s tapped four or five times, and then at the end we make a disc and test it to make sure the whole kettle is homogenous.”
A lab with an emission spectrograph, direct reader, and chemical testing methods helps RSR maintain quality control over its lead products, which are cast into ingots or blocks. Excess lead is trimmed, and then the ingots and blocks are promptly transported to customers.
Middletown maintains its own fleet of semi-tractor trailers and drivers who pick up scrap lead and ship out finished product, often in a closed-loop situation where the trucks go to a battery plant, drop off lead and pick up scrap, then return to Middletown to drop off the scrap and pick up lead, Nordstrom says. And the battery manufacturers’ trucks frequently follow a similar loop, as do the common carriers employed by the Middletown plant.
Ahead of the Environmental Curve
Working with lead means that RSR is in a “toxic metal business,” Nordstrom says, adding, “I like to tell our customers that we’re not a producer of lead, we’re a processor of a hazardous material. We all have to be aware of that and stay ahead of the curve in keeping our plants clean and our employees healthy and safe, and making a quality product for our customers.”
This farsighted mindset didn’t come about without a cost, however. In addition to spending $100 million in capital improvements in the past several years, the company has increased staff specialists in environmental areas. And two years ago, recognizing the need for a more responsive environmental accounting process, RSR created a new reporting structure for its in-house environmental managers.
Under the new system, each plant’s environmental compliance manager reports not to the plant manager, but instead to the corporate vice president of environmental, health, and safety compliance in Dallas. Likewise, that vice president reports not to RSR’s president but directly to the board of directors.
“We did this to ensure that there’s an independent oversight function that is going to ensure to the greatest extent possible that everything is done exactly as it should be,” Nordstrom says.
And while there were concerns about how the system would work, since it functions outside the normal chain of command, RSR has been pleased with the results thus far. The environmental compliance people are “viewed as a resource rather than an enforcer,” Nordstrom notes. “People come to them and say, ‘Educate me about how we’re supposed to do this.’”
Of course, environmental safety when dealing with lead batteries begins before the material arrives at the Middletown site. The first step is meeting the packaging requirements of the U.S. Department of Transportation. All lead-acid batteries, whether collected by a manufacturer or scrap processor, must be shipped in a manner that prevents both short circuits and leakage, Nordstrom explains. That means stacking the batteries so that their posts don’t touch, then strapping down or shrink-wrapping the whole pallet.
In addition, the battery cases must be intact. Cracked or leaking batteries must be packaged in a separate, leakproof container and manifested as a hazardous waste. “If our drivers go to pick up batteries and the batteries aren’t packaged properly, they’re instructed not to pick them up,” Nordstrom says. Fortunately, that scenario is extremely rare, he adds, noting, “the scrap industry as a whole has done an outstanding job in educating its constituents that batteries need to be packaged and handled properly.”
The Human Element
Once the batteries are on RSR’s property, the firm works hard to guarantee both employee and environmental safety.
Since lead can enter the human body through breathing and ingestion, steps must be taken to ensure that it isn’t in the air or on surfaces in any dangerous quantities. RSR, for instance, uses enormous exhaust units to create negative air pressure throughout the Middletown plant, essentially sucking out airborne lead at a rate of 320,000 cubic feet of air per minute and sending it through a HEPA filtration system for collection. These collectors are strategically located throughout the facility to capture all potentially hazardous emissions.
To prevent employees from ingesting lead, RSR prohibits eating and drinking on the plant floor. And smoking isn’t permitted anywhere on the site, not even in the lunchroom, to ensure that lead dust isn’t transferred to someone’s cigarettes.
All employees wear company-provided uniforms, gloves, and respirators (as well as hard hats and ear plugs as part of the firm’s safety program) and must vacuum their uniforms and wash their protective boots before leaving any lead-exposure environment. In addition, they must shower and change into street clothes before leaving the plant itself. The uniforms never leave the plant—an in-house laundry cleans them for reuse—and employees’ street clothes never get farther than the clean locker room, explains George Martin, Middletown’s safety and health manager.
RSR’s protective measures have yielded impressive results, if its employees’ blood lead levels are any indication. Lead exposure is measured by the amount of lead in a person’s blood, and OSHA has set a legal limit of 40 micrograms per 100 milliliters of blood. The Middletown plant average is 17 micrograms, Martin notes, and RSR puts anyone with a blood lead level of 25 micrograms or higher in the “elevated” category and takes special precautions with them.
Lead exposure can vary based on an individual’s personal hygiene habits, Martin explains. “How well they clean their hands or face, whether they smoke or bite their nails—all these things have an impact on the individual’s ability to fend off the intake of lead into the system,” he observes. So employees on the elevated blood level list are required to shower and change uniforms more often—during their shift as well as at the end—and they receive counseling on avoiding lead hazards from the company physician or nurse, Martin says.
In addition, Middletown offers cash incentives for employees to keep their blood leads low—as much as $2,500 a year—which Martin credits with cutting the plant’s blood lead levels nearly in half, from its average of 30 micrograms or higher in the 1970s.
Investing in the Future
In addition to protecting its employees, RSR has invested heavily to protect the environment around its plants. At the Middletown site, for instance, the firm recently installed a sodium sulfate crystallizer to help recycle liquid and gaseous acidic waste into a product for use in the detergent industry. And after installing a scrubber to remove contaminants from vented gases at its City of Industry plant as required by California law, RSR decided on its own to install such equipment at its Middletown and Indianapolis sites.
“We opted to put them in as part of a corporate philosophy of wanting to be where we think the standards will go,” Nordstrom explains. “Ultimately, we think everybody will need a scrubber.”
RSR’s plants also feature sensors that monitor all air emissions and can automatically shut down systems such as the blowers to the baghouse or the burners on the furnace if a problem is detected, notes Ron Bogart, environmental manager at the Middletown operation.
And to prevent groundwater contamination from sources such as piles of crushed batteries, 6 inches of concrete sit beneath the containment building floor, with a layer of steel pans beneath to catch any leakage, and then still more concrete below the pans. Environmental personnel check the pans for leaks every week, and test the pH level of any liquid collected, Bogart says.
In addition, the RCRA-permitted Middletown site has its own water treatment facility and sends samples to an outside laboratory every six days, as well as regular reports to the U.S. EPA and New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation. The plant is also building a new storm water collection system this year, including a slurry wall stretching across most of the site and three enormous storage tanks.
It takes all these elements—environmental farsightedness, technological savvy, a safe and healthy workplace, and business acumen—to operate a secondary lead smelter successfully these days. And as its Middletown plant indicates, RSR is certainly trying to lead by example. •
Here’s a look at how RSR Corp.’s Middletown, N.Y., subsidiary recycles potentially hazardous lead-acid batteries in a safe and environmentally sound way.