A more advanced shredding and separation system will help Premier Surplus extract valuable materials from small and high-grade electronic devices.
The Dawsonville, Ga. company has designed and ordered a system that includes a shredder, magnets, eddy current separator and optical sorter. Installation is scheduled for March 2019.
Founded in 2008 by husband and wife Phillip and Stephanie Kennedy, Premier Surplus provides ITAD, destruction and recycling services for organizations such as hospitals, schools, for-profit corporations, government agencies and others. Working out of a 137,000-square-foot space less than an hour’s drive from Atlanta, the privately held company processes about 19 million pounds per year.
Phillip Kennedy, the firm’s president, told E-Scrap News the company’s current shredding system, designed about five years ago, is used for product destruction services and recycling of low-grade devices such as printers, fax machines and copiers. It includes magnets and manual sorting stations. Meanwhile, higher-grade electronics are manually disassembled, he said.
But with growing volumes of both low and high grades – total company tonnages are increasing by about 12 percent a year – Premier Surplus designed a more robust shredding and separation system to handle high-grade electronics, Kennedy said.
“The system is designed to tackle not only a whole computer but a lot of smaller handheld devices, as well,” he said.
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Co-owners Phillip and Stephanie Kennedy inside the Premier Surplus facility.
SSI Shredding Systems, which supplied Premier Surplus’s existing shredding and separation system, will provide all components of the new system except the optical sorter, which is Tomra equipment supplied by Van Dyk Recycling Solutions. The company is hoping to process around 60,000 pounds per eight-hour shift with the new system. Kennedy declined to say how much the new system will cost.
After installation, Premier Surplus will still use the existing 200-horsepower shredder for retail product destruction and its existing 50-horsepower shredder for hard-drive destruction, he said.
“We’ve already secured market shares and footprint holds within the southeast industry,” he said. “The shred system is just going to secure us even stronger and allow us to offer a better service to our clients and new clients, as the company continues its growth.”
Photo courtesy of Premier Surplus.
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