Padnos, Hydro partner on aluminum sorting company | Crain's Grand Rapids Business

A longtime family-owned West Michigan metal processing company is partnering with a Norwegian aluminum and renewable energy firm to provide material for a new plant that produces millions of tons of recycled aluminum.

The Grandville location of industrial recycling company Padnos is the site of the new project with Hydro to bring its HySort technology to West Michigan. The advanced aluminum sorting technology has the potential to reduce waste and maximize the amount of material that can be reused, executives say.

“Aluminum is infinitely recyclable, but far too much of it ends up in landfills. The new sorting machine allows us to dig deeper in the pile and let more aluminum get a new lease on life,” Duncan Pitchford, president of Hydro Aluminum Metals U.S.A., said in a statement. “Advanced recycling is good for the environment, it’s good for the climate and it’s good for business.”

Alusort LLC is an equal partnership between the two companies in an effort to more effectively recycle aluminum and work toward both companies’ sustainability targets.

Hydro turned to Padnos to source material for Hydro’s new $150 million aluminum recycling plant in Cassopolis that opened in November 2023. The Cassopolis plant has the capacity to produce 265 million pounds of aluminum extrusion ingot a year, including for the automotive industry.

To make the aluminum recycling process more effective for both businesses, the partnership led to the installation of the HySort machines in Padnos facilities.

Since launching Alusort 10 months ago, Padnos renovated a portion of its Grandville facility to install HySort technology and associated conveyors that move metal in and out of the machine. The technology was a $4 million investment, Pitchford said in an interview. Aluminum processing began this September.

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“We are thrilled to begin commercial operations of the HySort machinery in conjunction with Hydro,” Sam Padnos, manager of nonferrous trading at Padnos, said in a statement. “The ramp-up of production will make a real difference for American manufacturing and, we hope, encourage everyone in the recycling industry to continue innovating toward a more circular, sustainable economy.”

While Padnos had its own system to shred and sort aluminum, the HydroSort technology — which is a type of laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy — is more advanced and can better detect different types of aluminum by sorting it by alloy. The process helps prevent waste in the recycling process.

“(HydroSort) uses lasers and high-speed spectrometers to tell you what alloy the aluminum is as it passes through the machine, and then the machine is able to sort it based on the readings it gets as to what alloy,” Pitchford said. “So we can make Coke cans back to Coke cans and iPhones back to iPhones, if you will, in that sortation process.”

Once the aluminum scrap is sorted at Padnos’ facility, Hydro will be able to use some of that material in its Cassopolis plant. Material that Hydro can’t use will remain at Padnos to be delivered to their existing customer base.

Pitchford said Hydro had known Padnos for many years as a supplier of aluminum scraps to use at their plants. One of Padnos’ strengths is the company’s “large network of feeder yards (and) they have relationships with industrial companies that generate scrap,” which made the company an appealing partner, Pitchford said.

“Padnos has been in the recycling business for a long time, and they operate an extensive network of feeder yards, whether they take in scrap material and engage in sorting and processing of that material, and that large footprint allows them to access lots of different types of scrap material, and in particular, what we’re interested in, of course, is scrap aluminum,” Pitchford said.

Pitchford declined to disclose how much aluminum material will be processed. According to an announcement on the project, HySort has an annual sorting capacity of 20,000 tons of aluminum scrap per year. From the recycled aluminum, the raw materials brought to the Hydro facilities will be converted to Circal brand aluminum with minimum 75% post-consumer scrap content, according to company officials.

“A lot of the material that we will produce at the plant in Cassopolis will end up in an automotive application,” Pitchford said. “I would say, you know, beyond that, growth markets that we see are things like solar and then other transportation applications, trucks, trailers, those sorts of things, and then building and construction, windows and doors.”

The Alusort partnership is a step toward Hydro’s wider strategy in meeting the increasing demand for low-carbon, recycled products by 2030. The advanced recycling in the Alusort partnership will help keep aluminum from ending up in landfills and instead aid in helping aluminum be recycled infinitely, Pitchford said.

“What we’re really looking forward to is using more and more of this post consumer, end-of-life material in our production process, and tapping into scrap streams that, in the past maybe had to be exported because we couldn’t sort them in a cost-effective manner in the U.S., and instead, we can keep them right in West Michigan and use them here at home,” Pitchford said.

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