‘This thing can shred a school bus’: Rock Hill company to give new life to metal
It’s two stories of blue and gold steel, a 1,500-ton behemoth of chutes that spans 6 acres. Squint and it might look like the latest attraction at Carowinds. But it was built for car-crushing carnage.
“We are seeing today one of the most advanced recycling systems in the nation,” said Charles Saleh, owner and CEO of Palmetto Recycling. “This system, really, is fully automated.”
The Herald toured a new $30 million metal recycling operation that will start operations next month in Rock Hill. It’s tucked into the back of the longtime Carolina Salvage property off Porter Road, near Interstate 77. Carolina Salvage dealt for decades in junk cars, you-pull-it parts and scrap metal.
A new shredding machine will take car disposal into a new generation.
It all starts at an eight-foot-wide intake ramp on a metal belt.
“This thing can shred a school bus,” said project manager Mark Saleh, son of Charles. “It’s that big.”
Or, it can destroy something as small as a microwave or toaster for recycling. The shredder likely will start with 20 to 30% vehicles. The rest will be demolition scrap metal, appliances or other items. It can process 80 to 120 tons of metal per hour, or about 40 cars per hour.
For anyone who has been to the more than 30-acre Carolina Salvage site to pull parts, the new shredder could process the rows and rows of jacked and blocked vehicles there in about two days.
Up the ramp intake, metal will face an onslaught of rotors and manganese hammers to break it down. Then it’ll be thrown against something like a giant cheese grater for sorting. The new equipment is able to sort for almost 20 materials, across several screening stations.
More employees needed
Some stations use polarized cylinders to pick out metals that react to different frequencies. Others use pneumatics, where air bursts sort some metals from others. Each sorting area has a manual picking area where workers can sift through the 1 to 2% of materials the machine may miss. That’s part of the employee uptick from 35 to 60 jobs.
There are other shredders within a couple hundred miles, Mark Saleh said, but this one is different in that it sorts both ferrous (iron-based) and nonferrous materials.
The company expects to take vehicles and metal from across the Southeast. It could be cars or trucks from Rock Hill that won’t run anymore. It could be mom and pop brokers, commercial construction sites or industrial demolition. Palmetto Recycling fills the gap between consumers and steel mills.
The shredder runs on a 4,000 horsepower motor so powerful it has its own HVAC system that even in the recent heat had the inside of its powerhouse at 50 degrees. Other systems have separate HVAC units. Also in that control center, there’s a chair in front of six television screens where a manager can monitor camera feeds and control the entire site any time it’s operating — just in case.
“There are certain things a shredder shouldn’t shred,” Mark Saleh said.
Everything about the new shredder happens on a large scale. It’s on a 5-acre concrete slab that’s a foot thick. It took 80 containers to bring in the 10,000 pieces needed to build it, with parts made in 20 countries. The site has 35 miles of wire running through it.
The facility will need about the same amount of time for maintenance that it uses for shredding. In time, the shredding will largely take place at night so maintenance can happen during the day.
Years of preparation
The company has been working on the shredder project for five years. Groundbreaking was two years ago.
The Salehs see great business opportunity, but they’re also excited about the environmental impact the site could have. Recycled metals are cheaper, easier on the environment and last longer than ones coming from native ore, Charles Saleh said. Even the hammers used to thrash metal into bits will be routinely melted down for recycling.
There’s also a bigger recycling picture of sorts, said Rock Hill Mayor John Gettys. The property near Porter Road and Interstate 77 is part of an “avenue of progress” the city eyed several years back for large industrial projects. Porter Road corridor development in time will bring wealth to the south side of Rock Hill that has never had it before, Gettys said.
“What this plant does, where it’s located, is it rebuilds Rock Hill,” he said. “And makes our future something we’ve never seen before.”
