BCA streamlines recycling with portable alligator shears

MILWAUKEE—BCA Industries is making recycling and tire processing safer and more affordable.

The manufacturer of reduction machines offers a lineup of equipment, including portable and stationary shredders, sidewall removers, tread cutters, conveyors, magnetic separators, and vibratory, disc or trommel screens.

And to complete this line of products, the Milwaukee-based company has developed a portable, gas-powered hydraulic alligator shear, the PGS100. It's a product that John Neuens, industrial consultant at BCA, said fills a gap in the market by reducing oversized material into salable scrap.

While alligator shears aren't a new invention, existing units are predominantly stationary, Neuens said. BCA has done its fair share of repairs in the industry, and current portable offerings have needed improvement.

"Shears, of course, have been around for a long time, and portable gas shears have been built," Neuens said, adding that "it's an item that—to us—was never engineered properly for portable (use)."

The PGS100 was in development for about five to six months, and BCA sold its first unit about three months ago. As of the start of May, the company has sold a total of two portable shears with another two in process, Neuens said. The company anticipates selling between 15 and 20 per year.

There's much to brag about when considering the potential safety, cost savings and additional revenue opportunities the PGS100 can bring to recyclers, according to the company.

The PGS100 can reduce the size of any passenger truck, semi, construction or off-road vehicle tire up to 48 inches in diameter, as well as other materials of similar size, such as building materials, sheet metal, wood and plastic.

And while shears may be slower than shredders, they also are less expensive. Neuens said BCA's shears are "twice as fast as anything else in the market," and its hydraulic lift keeps it safe and effective.

Due to its quicker cycle times and ability to be activated by one operator, the shears reduce labor, which is critical in today's tight labor market, Neuens said. And it's safer thanks to its two-handed activation, ensuring the equipment only activates when the operator is ready. It also boasts a 26.5 HP hydraulic drive, which negates the need for workers to lift heavy scrap onto the machine.

Neuens said the hydraulic lift, while not necessarily unique to the PGS100, is essential for a modern shear "because it's just really, really difficult, not only to get good labor, but to keep that labor healthy."

When your employees are lifting a 130-pound tire onto a shear, "that's a recipe for injury," Neuens said.

When considering the cost savings, Neuens said having onsite shredding capabilities reduces costs by eliminating the need to ship oversized waste to a larger, more expensive shredder.

With this portable platform, a recycler can reduce the size of scrap onsite before shredding it.

"Since many tires and materials are too large to be easily transported, portable equipment can cut the tire down to size onsite so it can be processed by a more affordable-sized shredder," Neuens said in a recent news release.

This also provides recyclers with the opportunity to take advantage of the "lucrative revenue source" of shredding larger tires, he added, which recyclers tend to shy away from when they can't shred them as-is.

"Tires aren't one thing, tires are 100 different things," Neuens said. "And so you're trying to develop equipment that'll handle 98-99 percent of what these tire processors and scrap dealers have to deal with when they try to dispose of them properly or recycle the material."

The average tire scrapper, he said, gets 20 percent of its feedstock from oversized tires that are larger than what the shredder can handle, and to be able to handle those "oddball" tires, the company would have to double or triple the size of its current shredder.

"Well, for a much smaller amount of money, he can handle those, albeit a bit slower, but he can handle them" by utilizing BCA's PGS100 shears, he said.

"The shear is just a natural extension of meeting those needs when you're not going to spend three quarters of a million or $1 million on a shredder," Neuens said. "It takes care of those needs for between $60,000 and $80,000."

Neuens affirmed that there are no sacrifices in quality when it comes to making this machine portable. "For the intended purposes, it's plenty beefy," he said.

He noted that when it comes to portable machines, buyers are often concerned about sacrifices in quality. For shredders, all that's really given up, he said, is the ease of expanding into a more sophisticated process.

"That doesn't mean it can't be done—in fact, we design all of our portables to mate into each other—but in general, portable means it is what it is," he said.

But a shear, he said, is more of a singular action in a singular product. "It's engineered to be just as good as any stationary piece of equipment you'd put in a building."

The shears are a critical first step in recycling and large tire processing as the "primary reduction" of large waste, "so you can get it processed either into a smaller shredder or system, or simply reduce the volume for shipping," Neuens said.

"For the small and medium operator, (the PGS100) takes care of that oddball stuff that they have to pick up along with whatever the sweet spot of their business is."