Shredding expertise built on recycling experience 

‘In a competitive marketplace, you don’t want to be the least efficient recycler’ is one of its frequently used slogans. Basically, it means that if you want the very best in shredding solutions, Newell Recycling Equipment will serve you the very best. 

‘We’ve been recycling scrap ourselves for a long time, day in, day out. Over the years, no-one has had more motivation to improve the technology than us. Operating shredding and non-ferrous metal separation plants is a big part of what I have always done, and I want to do it again.’ So says Scott Newell, chairman of US-based Newell Recycling Equipment.

Headquartered in El Paso near the US-Mexican border, Newell has come a long way. The founder of the Newell businesses, Alton Scott Newell Sr. went to work in an automobile parts yard when he was 17 years old and owned his own business in 1938 when he was 23.

‘He did not finish high school but was self-educated and later in life was awarded two different honorary doctor degrees,’ says Newell. ‘He was a skilled mechanic and designed and built what is believed to be the first really portable baling press. This machine could be driven to a site and start baling old automobiles and appliances.’

Shredding cans

This led to the establishment of five Newell recycling companies with baling equipment, located in San Antonio, Austin, El Paso, Tucson and Phoenix. Alton Scott Newell Jr. (Scott Newell) began managing the Phoenix plant when he was 20 years old.

‘In that time copper mines in Arizona were using tin cans in a leach precipitation process to mine copper and the Newell companies were handling a lot of cans which were being sold to steelmaker Proler in El Paso,’ says Newell.

The tin cans needed to be shredded to be sold to the mines and Alton Newell built a small shredder. Soon the demand for shredded material grew and this led to larger and larger shredders to handle material other than tin cans.

Shredding for mills

Around this time, Proler was able to sell shredded steel material to an EAF steel mill. When this became known, Newell built the first limited feed, top discharge, shredder and started shredding for the steel industry, eventually doing so in all of Newell’s salvage plants.

The shredder was issued a patent and soon friends started asking Newell to build a machine for them. This led to the formation of the Newell Manufacturing Company, with Scott Newell as manager.

‘Engineering landmark’

In 1994, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers named the Newell Shredder a national engineering landmark because it had changed the way the industry works around the world.

Newell began operating a steel foundry during the mid 1970s with EAF furnaces making alloy steel replacement parts for Newell (and eventually all other brands’) shredder plants. This ability to quickly adopt improvements to castings kept the firm at the head of the industry.

Newell operated a steel foundry for about 40 years until government policies drove the foundry business and casting supply to China. Newell took its foundry management team to China and taught the lessons learned to the new foundry suppliers, thereby maintaining the knowledge and experience gained from the previous 40 years of running operations.

New frontier

Newell began selling shredding equipment into China in 1994 and had sold about 14 Newell shredders before entering a joint venture in 2017 with China Resource Development Corporation, the largest recycler of metals in China. The JV company, China Recycling Newell Equipment (CRNE) is managed by George An, who was Newell’s partner in China for about 10 years before the tie-up. Newell and An are controlling partners in CRNE.

To date, Newell has supplied more than 70 plants across the People’s Republic representing more than 50% of the total installed shredding capacity in China. This includes 22 shredders of 10 000 hp and 11 000 hp, both of which are shredding more than one million tonnes of scrap per year.

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