ERS designs and builds e-waste recycling systems in the United States, and the question we are asked more than any other is what one actually consists of.

It is five stages, not one machine.

Shredding reduces whole devices — towers, drives, boards — to a controlled particle size. Fines removal screens out the small, high-value fraction before it is lost downstream. Metal separation takes the ferrous out magnetically, then aluminium and mixed metals by eddy current. Density separation splits the remaining metal from plastic. Dust collection handles the fine, abrasive dust the process generates, which on electronics is a safety question, not housekeeping.

Get the sequence wrong and material leaves the building as mixed scrap at a mixed price. Get it right and every fraction leaves as a clean, saleable product.

The picture above is typical incoming material: boards, RAM, hard drives, small motors, power supplies and cable. Each one needs a different route through the line.

ERS engineers the whole line for processors across the US and Canada — feed, shredding, separation and dust collection as one system, from one supplier.

Friday 2 October is National Manufacturing Day, and recycled material sits at the centre of it. Steel, aluminium, copper and fibre recovered in this country go straight back into American production.

None of that happens on its own. ERS builds the equipment behind two industries, and neither of them runs without it.

In scrap and metals recycling, we design and install the separation lines that pull clean metal out of mixed material — feed, shredding, milling, air density tables, metal separation and dust collection, engineered as one line.

In paper and paper converting, we build the trim removal, vacuum transfer dust collection and scrap system dust collection that keep high speed machines running and the plant clean.

Both photographs above are our own crews partway through an install: a metals separation line on top, a paper dust collection system below. Not renders, not brochure shots. That is the work, and the people doing it are why the equipment is still running twenty years later.

ERS builds and installs complete scrap processing lines across the United States and Canada, and the question we are asked more than any other is how to pick the scrap shear at the centre of one. So we are publishing a five-part series on how to choose a scrap shear.

Part 1 starts where most buying decisions do not: the manufacturer. True shear manufacturers are few. Does the supplier have the size, the machine tools and the structure to build one? Go and see where your money is going.

Requirements have moved. Only a few years ago a 300-ton machine with a 600 mm blade and a 5-metre box was standard. Today 500 tons is considered small, the blade is never shorter than 800 mm, and pre-compression boxes run 6 to 7 metres with an opening over 2.4 m — the width of a truck bed.

The reason is the material. Clean collected scrap and end-of-life vehicles increasingly go elsewhere, leaving the shear the tough, bulky, structural work. Quality of the sheared product now matters more than tonnage. A shear is expected to give at least 20,000 hours of honest service.

ERS partners with TAURUS in the U.S. for shear balers and mobile scrap processing equipment, and engineers the feed, separation and dust collection around them as one line.

Parts 2 to 5 follow weekly: design and construction, the shear, the pre-compression box, and the hydraulic and control system.