The world-renowned Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC has acquired a significant piece of recycling history with the donation of a section from a 1961 shredder.
The Prolerizer, which could shred a vehicle or other large durable consumer products in minutes, is seen a watershed invention by the Proler family of Houston, USA.
Labour-intensive
Their equipment made possible the recycling of cars and other durables that had reached the end of their useful lives. Prior to this, vehicle recycling was a labour-intensive process involving handheld torch cutters and alligator shears, with derelict cars becoming a widespread problem for American towns and cities.
The Proler family found a way to grind up cars, extract clean steel and send it back to the steel mills to create new products. The primary invention consisted of a rotor with many hammers. Powered by a large engine, it could shred entire vehicles into fist-sized pieces that could be separated into ferrous and non-ferrous materials, providing mills with a superior quality of scrap for recycling.
Transformation
Ben Proler (1894–1970) started the family business in the 1920s and, with the help of his sons Izzy, Sammy, Hymie and Jackie, transformed their local scrap dealership in Houston into Proler Steel, a publicly held global company.
Advantage Metals Recycling decommissioned its 1961 Prolerizer, nicknamed Deborah, in the summer of 2024, and has donated a representative part of the machine and early archival materials to the Smithsonian.
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