A comprehensive approach in India - Recycling Today

Brian Taylor, Senior Editor

The JRPL business unit of Jain Metal Group, based in Chennai, India, has in a six-year span established an automated wire and cable scrap processing plant with a global footprint on both the buy and sell sides.

As another sign of the family business’ comprehensive approach to wire recycling, the company further sorts and processes the plastic granules generated by its chopping lines and has found end markets for the predominantly polyvinyl chloride (PVC) granules it produces.

While the JRPL wire chopping facility was established in 2018, the company has been in the metals business for 75 years, and Jain Metal has offices in India, the United States, Canada and the United Arab Emirates.

Those existing connections helped the company hit the ground running when it came to buying scrap wire and cable to help feed the processing facility that was commissioned six years ago.

JRR, another business unit of Jain Metal Group, claims expertise in processing lead-copper cables. JRR describes lead-copper cables as bulky and heavy and requiring special handling and specialized machines for processing. The JRR plant to make lead ingots itself consumes the lead scrap obtained from processing, plus trades copper and sends the plastic to JRPL’s plastic recycling facility.

Jain Metal Group now handles some 7,000 tons of wire and cable scrap per month, including insulated household cables, lead-copper cables, aluminum cables, armored copper cables and wire harnesses.

The material arrives in Chenai from India, the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia and New Zealand from a network of more than 200 suppliers (both yards and traders).

Generation and the collection network for cable scrap within India is starting to grow, says Mayank Pareek, managing director of the company, but currently represents only about five percent of inbound material for the group.

At the JRPL facility, thicker cables with pure (or a vast majority of) aluminum and copper inside are sent to a section of the facility with several stripping machines and operators.

Thinner wire or cables with a more complicated interior are directed to chopping lines with size reduction machines that take on shredding, crushing, granulating and gravity-air separation tasks. The gravity-air separators and additional automated machinery works to separate aluminum from copper and nonmetallic materials from each of the nonferrous metal streams.

“Our quality is well recognized and our products are preferred by many export buyers," the company says of its metallic end products.

Jain Metal says its quality standards and its location near the port of Chennai means that while 40 percent of its aluminum and copper chops are sold in the domestic market, the other 60 percent serves the export market.

“We export to East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, China, Malaysia, Thailand, etc., from Chennai port at economic prices, and it involves less transit time” compared with Europe or North America, the firm says.

A common frustration for wire processors is what to do with discarded stripped plastic coatings or postshredder plastic granules.

“After the cable granulation plant was successfully commissioned in 2018, the challenge of disposing of the plastic chops in an environmentally friendly manner quickly came up,” Pareek says. “Soon, we set up a plastic recycling plant for separation of predominantly PVC chops from the mixed plastic chops, and then making soft PVC granules."

Jain Metal says the quality of its PVC granules makes them suitable for use in injection molding and calendaring (melting and extrusion) applications.

“We quickly developed PVC compounds and started giving tailored solutions to customers,” Pareek says.

The company's soft PVC granules are now being used in end products that include the soles of shoes and subflooring materials.