31recyclinginternational.com | July/August | 2021
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TOP
100
2021
Doug Kramer, owner of Kramer Metals/
Spectrum Alloys (USA)
As with so many fellow recyclers, Kramer Metals of Vernon, Los
Angeles was challenged by Covid-19. Recycling International talked with
Kramer in the first weeks of the pandemic. ‘The world has shut down,’ the
former ISRI chair lamented. ‘There’s no open or free movement of scrap and
that is scary.’ At the same time, he was optimistic about the future.
‘Although the uncertainty of how long this will take hurts, I believe we will
be OK and our business will survive this crisis.’
Kramer Metals has proved to be resilient. The company, as with the entire
scrap recycling industry across the US and worldwide, was considered part
of an essential sector.
TES (USA)
TES uses proprietary in-house technology to recover nickel, lithi-
um and cobalt from car batteries. The company currently has 45
recycling plants in more than 20 countries and is active in China. In March, it
opened a new battery recycling facility in Singapore which relies on a hydro-
metallurgical process. The site can handle 14 tonnes of lithium-ion batteries,
the equivalent of 280 000 smart phones, every day. TES manages a 90%
recovery rate and extracts battery materials with 99% purity.
Murat Bayram, director non-
ferrous at EMR (Germany/
UK)
‘You need to be an all-rounder to survive in scrap
metal trading,’ says Bayram. Certainly, this scrap
trader from Hamburg fits the bill. One can hardly
imagine a congress or online event without him in
the line-up. Bayram frequently climbs on to confer-
ence stages to share his views on the industry’s
ups-and-downs. He always advocates the interest
of the recycling sector in general rather than pro-
moting the company he represents.
It’s Bayram’s style of presentation people enjoy:
open, enthusiastic and with humour. His comment
are always illustrated with personal, close-to-home
experiences. Example: in a recent online BIR panel
discussing electronics design for recycling and
repair, Bayram explained how his sons’ car toy
remote control failed but could not be fixed due to
the device’s complex contents.
The recycling industry could use more storytellers
such as Murat Bayram.
Dhawal Shah, managing director of Metco
Marketing (India)
Besides being a scrap trader running a profitable business, Shah
is a true ambassador for his country and its recycling sector. During the lat-
est BIR convention, Shah expressed deep sorrow at the Covid pandemic’s
devastating recent impact on India: ‘It’s beyond imagination; we paid a
heavy toll,’ he said.
Talking with this commerce graduate from Mumbai, helps to better under-
stand India. ‘We are not there yet, we have to undo decades of inefficiency
and corruption. But the good days will come. This is all work in progress,’ he
told RI in 2018.
The good news is, India has already the world’s sixth-largest economy with
65% of its population under the age of 35. Every day, 40 km of new road is
being added and the country already has more than a billion telephone con-
nections.
Shah is vice-president of the Metal Recycling Association of India and serves
on the metals committee of the Federation of Indian Chambers of
Commerce and Industry. In June 2021 Shah was appointed the new division-
al president for non-ferrous at BIR.
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