Page 39 from: Country report New Zealand and much more!

TECHNOLOGY EXPERTS

One man’s mission
for a better resource
recovery industry

environment and its people. So he set out to find
a high-end technology solution for better recov-
ery of resources. His emphasis was on metal pro-
cessing and reusability, to reduce its carbon foot-
print and the impact of hazardous waste.
In 1989, he built a plant for melting cans in
Denmark, investing EUR 8 million. Following the
fall of the Berlin Wall, cheap metal overstocked
the market and three years later he was bank-
rupt. ‘I lost everything,’ he says.

starting anew with just twO
In 2002 Pedersen started from scratch to build
the Danish company we know today, Scanmetals.
He and Sue (his first employee and still in the
company) started by handpicking non-ferrous
metals in clean material to secure higher value.
The 2008 financial crisis affected the company
but this time his belief, persistence and determi-
nation pushed him onwards. ‘Steinert was there
to help when I needed a solution and they rent-
ed me their X-ray (XRT) sorting machine to pro-
duce clean aluminium products,’ he explains.
This was the start of a financial independence

giving him the opportunity to expand his ideas
throughout Europe. Today, because of
Pedersen’s success, there are many different
sorting plants upgrading IBA into primary
resources.

it’s all abOut thOse fine grains
Six years ago, Pedersen says, no-one believed in
the potential of small particles in IBA. ‘We pro-
duce four truckloads of aluminium every day,’ he
points out. ‘The resource hungry industry is wait-
ing for it!’ It is a priority for these industries not
to source from primary mining because using
high quality secondary raw materials enhances
their sustainability report.
The biggest incinerator in Copenhagen produc-
es about 240 000 tonnes of IBA per year.
Approximately 20% of the waste that goes into
an incinerator ends up as bottom ash. Within
this, 2% is metal – pieces that range from 1-100
mm. Eddy current separation can lift the value in
the IBA from 2% to 50-60%. This 50-60% of
treated bottom ash is available on the market for
around EUR 1 000 per tonne. ‘This means we
pay EUR 2 000 Euro for a tonne of metal. The
small pieces are important to me,’ says
Pedersen.

accurate separatiOn anD sOrting
technOlOgy
Pedersen’s focus is on aluminium and the high-
end quality metals acquired from secondary
smelters. He invests in technology to reduce and
remove free heavy metals and aluminium alloys.
The process starts with a non-ferrous metal sepa-
rator for the recovery of zorba from the IBA
material, followed by the induction sorting sys-
tem to extract stainless steel. Steinert XSS T
(X-ray transmission) produces very clean alumini-
um by screening out heavy metals and high-alloy
aluminium. The sorter detects so accurately that
it creates a product quality of 99.9% pure alu-
minium.

reDucing DepenDency On primary
metals
The STEINERT KSS FLI XF (X-ray fluorescence) is
a state-of-the-art solution for the separation of
the heavy metals into copper, brass, zinc and
precious metals. More than 97% purity of heavy
metal products has been achieved. Customers
such as aluminium smelters produce beverage
cans from almost 100% of Scanmetals’ output of
that type of aluminium. The closed-loop
approach is real. For ‘virgin’ beverage cans, pro-

Scanmetals ceo Ejvind Pedersen with his
companion Tiger: ‘Steinert was there to
help when I needed a solution.’

The X-ray transmission sorter (XRT) separates hard
aluminium from soft.

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