The Bent Page

Did you ever wonder what happens to all that junk? Your old car, broken appliances, maybe an ancient lawn mower? Well here’s what happens to the vast majority of it. Actually this is Phase 2. Phase 1 is the local scrap metal hauler, be it the trash collector or another individual, picks it up from you or your recycling center or some such place. Then it travels to a place where it ends up looking like this:

You can see flattened cars in the pile as well as a jumble of other things. From this pile, the material is fed into what is known as a “shredder.” This machine is technically a hammer mill. Just imagine a long shaft with huge hammers hanging from it. Now spin that shaft with a 2,000 horsepower electric motor. Whatever those hammers strike is shattered into little pieces. Below is a photo of your junk being fed into the machine.

Here’s another one. This time the claw of the machine is beside the throat of the shredder.

Notice the steam coming off the shredder. Plenty of heat is generated by those hammers pulverizing all that material. Water is sprayed in to keep things cool. The pieces fall onto a conveyor belt system. These belts pass through various sorting devices including magnets to separate the ferrous (iron) from the non-ferrous (copper, aluminum, etc.). That system looks like this:

Ultimately some of the material is separated by hand. At the end of the line, there are individual piles of ferrous scrap, non-ferrous, and “fluff.” Fluff is all the plastic, foam rubber, paper, and miscellaneous garbage that is not metallic. Believe it or not, fluff has many uses including landfill cover and fuel stock. This pile is of the ferrous scrap or “frag” as it is called.

In Phase 3, this will be sent to a steel mill and converted into new steel. Scrap iron is the most recycled commodity in the United States. Every year, millions of tons of junk are converted into new products. There is also a massive export market for this and the non-ferrous scrap.

So what’s this got to do with a guy who writes books and travels? Well, a friend of mine owns the plant shown above. He’s quite the entrepreneur. It’s people like him and the guys who work in scrap yards that sometimes form the basis of the characters in my books. Besides, there’s never a dull moment around this kind of action. It sure beats the office.