Wendt Corp., Buffalo, New York, and strategic business partner MTB of France have designed, manufactured and installed a ragger wire chopping line at Niagara Falls, New York-based Santarosa Group, a family-owned and operated industrial waste and recycling company.
In business since 1951, Santarosa Group comprises a number of companies that have experience in a number of industries, including tire recycling, hazardous and radioactive waste management, biomass procurement and processing, transfer stations and environmental cleanup. Today, the company’s primary focus is on managing industrial waste streams, reprocessing them into valuable commodities, and managing hazardous materials throughout the country.
Santarosa Group invested in the chopping line to process ragger wire. Ragger wire, also referred to as ragger tail and pulper rope, is made during the paper/pulping process when trash is cleaned from the pulper vat. The waste material wraps around itself, creating a compact rope-like chain. Ragger wire consists of plastic trimmings, steel baling wire, staples, foil, insoluble papers and other impurities found in recovered fiber.
“We needed a heavy-duty chopping line to size and separate materials,” says Aaron Santarosa, president of The Santarosa Group. “We are putting waste streams which contain various materials that can destroy a typical shredder, and the MTB Shredder was able to withstand those materials without ruining the machine in addition to providing the specialized materials for our end users.”
Santarosa Group’s chopping line features an MTB BDR 2400 shredder, MTB TMR 600 ferrous extractor and belt conveyors. The MTB shredder cuts the tough-to-process ragger wire into 2-inch long pieces, while the TMR 600 extracts the ferrous metals. The company also recently purchased an eddy current separator to recover nonferrous metals from the ragger wire. Along with the ferrous and nonferrous metals recovered, this process provides a finished paper/plastic product that the company can sell as a fuel source, Wendt says.
“Our revenue has increased dramatically since we started the operation, and now that we are fully operational we have been able to grow our markets and experiment with different products,” Santarosa says.
In addition to using the chopping line for the ragger wire application, Santarosa Group is shredding numerous aluminum products, plastic and paper rejects, plastics, ferrous wire, coiled ferrous wire, tires, wood and MRF residue, among other materials.
Operating five-to-six days per week, the shredder is running at a rate of 1,300 tons per month.
“Our long-term goal with this investment is to develop niche businesses to process and upgrade numerous waste streams into useful commodities,” Santarosa says. “With the tight spec that our customer requires, we have been able to be a dominant supplier at an efficient price. The MTB shredder has allowed us to not only recognize value as a preferred supplier, but we have done it at a lower than anticipated cost.”
Wendt Corp. is the exclusive strategic partner and distributer for MTB equipment, parts and service in North America. MTB has more than 35 years of experience manufacturing wire and cable chopping systems and is France’s largest processor, processing more than 40,000 tons of copper and aluminum cables each year.
