Until 2017 every machine in the hall fed one skip. Steel, stainless, aluminium and bronze swarf, mixed with coolant, went to a scrap dealer who paid a mixed-metal price and, we later found out, sent most of it to landfill. That year we did the sum.<\/p>\n
Mixed machining swarf sells for roughly a third of the price of clean, segregated swarf of the same alloys. Aluminium swarf mixed with steel is barely worth collecting; the same aluminium, clean and dry, sells at close to ingot price minus the melt loss.<\/p>\n
We produce about 240 tonnes of swarf a year. At the mixed price it was worth a little under \u20ac40,000. Segregated, it is worth about \u20ac110,000.<\/p>\n
Forty-one colour-coded bins, one per machine per alloy. A centrifuge to spin the coolant out of the aluminium so it ships dry. A morning of training, and a rule: a bin with the wrong metal in it is emptied into the mixed skip, whoever put it there. Total outlay, including the centrifuge: \u20ac31,000.<\/p>\n
The bins paid for themselves in five months. Everything since has been margin, and none of it goes to landfill.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
What it did for the certificate<\/h3>\n
Sorting by alloy is also what made ISO 14001 possible. The auditor wants a chain of custody for every stream: where it came from, who took it, what it became. Mixed swarf has no chain. Segregated swarf has a weighbridge ticket and a mill receipt per stream.<\/p>\n
Last year the total across swarf, offcuts and unrecoverable remanufacturing returns was 2,840 tonnes back to the melt. Landfill: none.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mixed swarf is worth a third of segregated. The bins cost less than one month of the difference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":21,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[15,9,16],"class_list":["post-44","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-materials","tag-aluminium","tag-material-recovery","tag-zero-landfill"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preview.industrial.anpsthemes.com\/demo13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preview.industrial.anpsthemes.com\/demo13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preview.industrial.anpsthemes.com\/demo13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preview.industrial.anpsthemes.com\/demo13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preview.industrial.anpsthemes.com\/demo13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preview.industrial.anpsthemes.com\/demo13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preview.industrial.anpsthemes.com\/demo13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preview.industrial.anpsthemes.com\/demo13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preview.industrial.anpsthemes.com\/demo13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preview.industrial.anpsthemes.com\/demo13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}