SSI—The Nordstrom of Shredders

SSI Shredding Systems Inc. is dedicated to making not only high-quality slow-speed shredders and balers, but also offering above-and-beyond customer service.

By Kristina Rundquist

Kristina Rundquist is an associate editor for Scrap.

Tom Garnier, president of SSI Shredding Systems Inc. (Wilsonville, Ore.), sits at his desk surrounded by an impressive array of toys. Crayons, Play-Doh, and an assortment of figurines that could have come straight from a Happy Meal cover his shelves. A pint-size tractor and wagon is parked under his desk. In the corner sits a Japanese pinball machine.

In SSI’s offices, almost every day is Casual Friday, neckties rarely make an appearance, and suits don’t exist. During the summer, the company hosts a barbecue the last day of every month on its back patio.

To an outsider, it may seem that all is fun and games at this 100,000-square-foot manufacturing facility on the outskirts of Portland. But don’t let the company’s laid-back atmosphere fool you. SSI’s employees are serious when it comes to what they do—engineering, designing, and manufacturing slow-speed, high-torque rotary shredders and preload compactors and balers. In the firm’s relatively short history, it has built a seriously positive reputation for custom-designing equipment to meet customer needs. Add its customer service focus—encompassing equipment refurbishing and test-processing services—and you have a company that’s also a serious player in its niche.

A Shred of History

SSI’s first job was in 1983 for Union Carbide Corp.’s plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Union Carbide needed a shredder to destroy its packaging materials. The Cold War was still being waged and the company “feared that the Russians could tell what they were making by looking at the packaging,” says Garnier. “It was all highly classified.”

This project launched SSI’s odyssey into the world of Fortune 500 clients. “It was then that we started developing an engineering staff and making products to fit the client’s needs,” says Garnier.

From there, SSI began doing other specialized work, delving into the world of military contracts and torpedo-head shredding. Its involvement in the Three Mile Island cleanup project was a logical step to SSI, but not to others in the industry. “When they needed a shredder to lower into the core of the reactor, we were the only company to look at the job,” Garnier recalls. Today, the company can quickly name several large international projects where its custom designs and engineering integration won it business opportunities—for example, a system that handles all hazardous waste generated in Norway and a recent contract with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to supply shredders to one of the world’s largest incineration plants in Singapore.

While SSI has certainly refined the art of slow-speed rotary shredding, the technology has been around since the late 1860s when it was used in animal rendering and slaughterhouses, Garnier says. For years, the technology lay dormant, making a mini-comeback in the 1950s for shredding tires. In the 1960s and 1970s, slow-speed shredders gained favor in pharmaceutical applications, but it wasn’t until 1973—and passage of the Clean Air Act—that companies had to find other processing and/or disposal options for materials that had previously been incinerated.

Slow-speed shredders presented such an option. “The only other shredding equipment companies could use were hammermills, which often were a lot more machinery than a company needed,” Garnier explains. “Companies then had to think about feed systems and material preparation. They looked at their choices and saw the emerging technology of the rotary shear and thought, ‘Hey, let’s try this.’”

With the growing popularity of on-site shredders, some entrepreneurs were beginning to see opportunity in providing mobile contract shredding services. 

Garnier was one of those entrepreneurs. Using a slow-speed shredder available on the market, Garnier saw a need to improve the industry’s technology and equipment. His goal was to maximize online reliability and, therefore, operating uptime while decreasing maintenance. Working on these features, SSI transformed its core business to the exclusive design and manufacturing of shredders.

Experience as a shredder user gave the company a strong empathy with, and perspective of, the customer. This frame of reference forms the bedrock of SSI’s foundation. In its boardroom, the firm proudly displays its patents, which serve as proof that it knows what customers want and need in their shredders. Two of these patents, ACLS and SSP, are of particular interest. ACLS, an acronym for advanced cutter locking system, is a preload hub assembly that uses a series of sequentially tightened bolts to apply a force of 100,000 pounds to the end of the cutter stack—almost 850 percent more than most available threaded nut arrangements. For customers, the ACLS design means reduced maintenance, faster cutter changes, increased cutter life, shredding quality, online reliability, and enhanced shaft protection. SSI’s patented SSP—severe shock protection—offers the most advanced level of shockload protection available in the industry, the company says.

In addition to reliability, Garnier decided product flexibility was important—to provide the right equipment for the right job. This included offering both hydraulic and electric-drive machines. No other company offered this option at the time. SSI also committed to make its equipment according to each customer’s unique specifications and needs.

That willingness to specialize is what attracted large corporations such as Phillips Petroleum Co. and 3M to be two of SSI’s first customers. “They came to us before we had built anything. Why?” Garnier asks, answering “because we were willing to give them what they wanted.”

Branching Out

Initially, SSI manufactured only slow-speed shredders but soon saw the need to broaden its scope.

“We had a strong handle on shredders, so we took a look at what other products we could bring to our clients,” Garnier says. “We wanted to build a business with balance. And as it so happened, the more traditional side of the business with scrap processors and waste haulers particularly interested us.”

After talking with executives in the waste hauling business, Garnier and his team targeted a preload compactor to add to their product line. First developed for waste transfer stations, SSI adapted the technology for processing scrap metal. The result? The 2500-SP compactor—the granddaddy of all compactors. One unit alone weighs more than 100,000 pounds. According to Jerry Mishler, technical salesman, it’s ideal for baling light steel and white goods and operates roughly six times faster than other large balers. With at least a four-to-one reduction ratio, the preload compactor is capable of producing three 10-ton bales an hour, compared with 4 or 5 tons an hour from other balers, Mishler says.

Among its other attributes, the compactor offers remote operation and can direct-load material onto a truck to the correct load weight. The unit’s scales signal the infeed conveyor to automatically shut off when the proper load weight has been reached. “The truck can then back right up to the compactor,” Mishler says. “Load two bales into the trailer and away you go.”

The compactor also has a constant-density feature. It produces bales of a consistent density throughout, even when processing loads with lighter- and heavier-weight material mixed together. “The compaction cycles automatically adjust to yield a maximum payload,” explains Terri Ward, director of sales and marketing. 

Thanks to these features, the compactor has received rave reviews, Mishler says. “It provides uniformly dense, highly compact bales, but not so dense that they won’t break apart when you load them onto a conveyor or need to see what’s inside them.”

The key to this behemoth is, of course, volume. “It’s a very specific piece of equipment and only a few big scrap plants can use it,” he says.

Recognizing that the average plant doesn’t require that much muscle, SSI has developed a smaller version, the 7X-NF baler. Specifically designed to process nonferrous scrap, this off-axis, horizontal baler with twin 7-inch cylinders compacts material and shears off oversize pieces.

This manual-tie baler, says Mishler, gives “a bale of similar dimensions to those produced by larger models. It’s great for smaller processors who don’t need to produce a large number of bales every day. They’ll get a better price per bale since not only is each one denser, but the larger processors who buy their material won’t need to rebale the material.”

If You Build It, They Will Shred

Currently, SSI offers 11 series of shredders ranging in power from 7.5 to 1,000 hp and available for a wide range of applications from needles to giant mining tires to defunct missiles. Notes Mishler, “We have a standard family of sizes, and then we tweak them depending on the application. The cutters are as specific as the application, and we’ll make whatever kind is best for the type of shredding the customer does.”

Standard with every model is an automatic-reverse feature that protects the shredder against material overfeeds. The high-torque, slow-speed design of SSI’s shredders enables them to process especially bulky material without the need for preprocessing, Mishler says. Their slow speed also means less maintenance and downtime, as well as less dust and noise, which makes for a safer, more pleasant work environment for the shredder operator, he notes.

According to Mishler, most of the company’s orders—about 75 percent—originate with a client request. “They send us a sample of the material they want to process and say, ‘This is what we want. Can you help us get there?’” From there, a project manager from SSI’s engineering department begins working with the client to produce the ideal machine or configuration for its operation.

After SSI receives an order for one of its systems, it begins the manufacturing process by placing orders to specialty alloy manufacturers all over the country. Cutters arrive in rough form and are sent off to one of SSI’s vertical CNC mills, where they get either a hex or double-key treatment—a reference to the holes through which the cutters will be secured to the shredder, explains Karl Williams, project engineer. Then they’re sent out for heat treatment—the only step SSI farms out. When the cutters return to SSI, they head to a grinder for finishing.

Meanwhile, work has begun on the machine’s frame. The frames of SSI’s shredders are a torsion box construction, which gives them “a more robust design,” Williams says.

The only major components of standard SSI shredders that are manufactured elsewhere are the hydraulic motors and planetary gear reducers. SSI is unique in that it cuts its own gears, says Williams. “Although each frame has a standard gear, we also do custom gears from time to time,” he says.

Controlling its manufacturing process gives SSI an advantage, says Mishler. “If somewhere in the middle of the process we discover something isn’t working quite the way we think it should,” he notes, “we stop and make the necessary adjustments. We have a lot of flexibility.”

That flexibility extends beyond the making of a single piece of machinery. “We don’t finish refining the product once we secure an order,” Mishler says. “We work with customers continuously to keep moving forward and pushing performance to the edge. As a company, we work with our clients after a sale. We never want them to feel they’ve been sold something and then we’ve disappeared.”

Service, SSI-Style

When it comes to customer service, Garnier says that SSI gives the “Nordstrom guarantee,” referring to the retailer’s philosophy that the customer’s needs are first and foremost. “My view is that we’re really selling customer service and our products are the vehicles through which we deliver it,” he states. “If I start thinking of profit as the main goal, I’ll forget the purpose of the company. But if I make customer service my goal, the profits will always follow.”

Part of this customer-first approach was evidenced last Thanksgiving. As Williams tells it, he was the project engineer on-call over the holiday when he received a 2 a.m. phone call from a customer with a 24-hour production line who urgently needed a replacement part. Since SSI keeps a constant inventory of basic spare parts, Williams was able to ship the client the required part special delivery. “He had his new planetary gear reducer by 10 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day,” he says.

SSI also goes the extra distance for its customers by offering to test-process the client’s material at the SSI headquarters. SSI invites the client to visit its plant and witness the testing. If the principals can’t attend, SSI videotapes the test and sends the tape to the client along with a sample of the shredded material.

Ever-mindful of the changing marketplace, SSI realizes that keeping customers is easier than securing new ones. For this reason, the company will go to great lengths to keep a customer satisfied. To wit, SSI will refurbish or retrofit parts for clients’ machines—even if they operate a competitor’s equipment. “Not only is this a good business practice,” notes Ward, “but it leads to ongoing product development and improvement.”

To keep its reputation as spotless as its headquarters, SSI also purchases its used equipment. “We don’t see a lot of our competitors actively doing this,” Ward says, “but it’s important to us. We don’t want someone to buy our equipment secondhand and use it for the wrong application.” If, for example, a processor tries to use a tire shredder to process plastics, they may find that the machine isn’t “doing the job they think it should,” she says. “We want our custom equipment to be used appropriately.”

Garnier believes it’s more than service, however, that has allowed SSI to rise so quickly within its field. He credits the firm’s employees with a large part of its success. As he points out, “Oregon is filled with cowboys. People here feel they’re in charge of their destiny. So whether you’re an executive or floorsweeper, we have a lot of pride in our work and believe that no one will best us. And because we’re cowboys, we’ll take on the fight.” •