Aluminium Recycling : Chasing the last one per cent

In the scrap trade, “clean enough” is a moving target. A load of aluminium that satisfies one buyer is discounted by the next, and the gap between the two is measured in fractions of a per cent of contamination. Benfleet Scrap Co has spent more than forty years living with that reality. When the family firm decided to take its aluminium output to a higher grade, it went looking for equipment that could close the gap – and built a new, highly automated aluminium recycling line to do it.

Benfleet is no newcomer. The Leeman family has been in the scrap and recycling industry for over four decades, incorporating the business in 1996 and expanding steadily to become one of the south-east’s largest independent metal recyclers. Around fifty staff handle ferrous and non-ferrous metals, end-of-life vehicles and skip hire for domestic, commercial and industrial customers. This is a company that already knew exactly what it was doing with metal. The question was how to do one part of it better.

Aluminium rewards precision. Recover it clean, with foreign material stripped away, and you produce well-defined alloys that buyers pay a premium for. Leave attachments behind and the same metal sells at a discount, load after load. The economic case for a serious aluminium line therefore comes down to one unglamorous number: how much non-aluminium remains stuck to the metal once it leaves the plant.

On the Benfleet line – fed with taint tabor, profiles and aluminium cuttings – that figure is around one per cent maximum attachment, a standard of purity well beyond what conventional shredders achieve when cleaning aluminium. Hitting it is the job of a sequence of heavy ELDAN machines, each built for one task. A Dual Shaft Super Chopper opens the incoming scrap first, the low-speed, high-torque primary shredder ELDAN has built its reputation on. A Tumble Back Feeder meters the flow. Then comes the centrepiece, the Multi Purpose Rasper (MPR), which physically liberates the metal, tearing attachments away from the aluminium so they can be separated out downstream.

For a plant whose margins depend on alloy quality, that one per cent result is the whole point. “It was a well-known fact to us when we were on the lookout for new equipment,” says Leo Leeman, Director at Benfleet Scrap Co. “A lot of the big players in the UK, as well as other companies around the world, have chosen ELDAN equipment for material processing. That made us lean towards ELDAN. To top that, service and parts support have been second to none, which is a vital factor in keeping production running.”

The reason a plant like this is hard to get right is rarely the headline machines. It is the integration. A complete aluminium line is not one supplier’s equipment but a dozen – feeders, magnets, eddy-current separators, granulators, separation tables – and the seams between them are where projects unravel. For an established business committing real capital, that complexity is the risk worth worrying about.

ELDAN’s answer is to own the whole thing. The company configures each system around what the customer actually needs – the type of aluminium coming in, the throughput required, the output size and quality – then puts a project team in charge of designing the layout, managing the build and overseeing installation on site. Leo Leeman sums the experience up in five words: “We envisioned, ELDAN designed, ELDAN delivered.”

What mattered most was that the responsibility did not stop at ELDAN’s own machines. Where the plant needed equipment from other manufacturers, ELDAN coordinated them too. “ELDAN took control, speaking to the other manufacturers to make sure everything was in place for all the other equipment to work in the plant,” Leo explains. The installation, he says, was straightforward, and on value for money the project has met every expectation. For a buyer assembling a complex line, that single point of accountability was as important as any individual machine.

There is a reason heavy, simple, maintainable equipment wins in this trade. Aluminium scrap is abrasive and unpredictable, and a line that stops is a line that loses money. The machines on the Benfleet floor leave the same impression – robust, built to absorb punishment – but what the operators value just as much is how little fuss they create.

The feedback Leo hears is consistent: the equipment is fast, easy to work with and easy to maintain. “Hydraulic doors and hatches to carry out inspections and blade changes make maintenance really easy,” he says. “This is very important, as maintenance is an extremely necessary thing to do on the recommended regular basis to keep the machine running perfectly.” Exchangeable wear parts, regrindable knives and quick screen changes look like minor details until the plant is running shifts – and then they are the difference between a line that performs and one that idles.

The plant has processed aluminium every day since it was installed in early 2023, turning out a range of alloys its customers are happy with. For a recycler that already commanded a strong position in Essex, it is a step up in what the business can offer: not just clean metal, but metal cleaned to a grade that opens better markets.

And the line has more in it than aluminium. The same system can, with the right configuration, take on other materials – cables, electronic waste and more sit within ELDAN’s wider catalogue. Benfleet knows it. “We are focusing on aluminium at the moment, but I am aware that we are able to process other materials through the system,” Leo says. “This is in our future plans.” Having chased the last one per cent on aluminium, the family seems unlikely to stop there.

In cooperation with ELDAN Recycling.