Aluminium scrap CNC punching nest frames
I have just seen on the BBC website that the Somerset and Avon Police (over 300 officers) have raided scrap yards across their region looking for stolen goods including ferrous and non-ferrous scrap metal. With the global requirement for certain metals pushing the costs up and up for example copper at over £5,000 per tonne and lead at over £2,000 per tonne its very tempting for some people to help themselves. The police are saying that with man hole covers, roof lead on churches and schools, copper wiring from telecoms systems, railway signalling and thefts from industries scrap bins it could be millions or even billions of pounds per year that is going missing. We have to be very careful with our scrap and store it all indoors until we are ready for the scrap / recycling companies to come and collect the metals ready for processing.
As a sheet metal manufacturing company the “waste” metals that we produce from our sheet metal guillotining and CNC punching manufacturing processes can all be recycled. We just have to be aware of the materials types that we are using to make our sheet metal work when saving them for recycling. We separate out the stainless steel, mild steel with zintec and galavanised steel, aluminium alloys, copper and brass into different bins ready for collecting. They are all collected and melted down with other scrap metals and prime material ores to produce more sheet metal or other metal items.
Stainless Steel scrap CNC punching nest frames
You can see in the images here various sheet metal that has either been produced as waste material from CNC punching through the dies known as slugs. These slugs are collected as the CNC punch presses punch holes in the sheet metal with the slugs being sucked away under a vacuum system. The CNC punched scrap frames is the material that is left around the sheet metal components that are CNC punched out. With our Trumpf CNC punch presses we will try and utilise as much of the sheet metal materialas possible to manitain a competitve piece part price but some material will do be used. Again, this sheet metal scrap is collected into material types before recyling.
Scrap CNC punching slugs
I guess being able to recycle so much of our prime manufacturing materials makes use quite a green company.
Casting with pure and re-cycled metal
Image: Kittikun Atsawintarangkul / FreeDigitalPhotos.net