Vehicle shredding business booms at port

A giant crane pulls a car from a pile and drops it on a conveyor belt feeding the belly of an industrial shredder.

Over the next 30 seconds the car will be hammered into pieces, the recyclable material, especially copper and aluminum, separated and readied for shipping while the unrecyclable material, also called fluff, will be taken to a landfill.

The process is repeated hundreds of times every day at the Port of Brownsville, where ship breaking companies have invested heavily in recycling.

The high price of scrap metals - copper is selling between $315 and $330 per metric ton while aluminum is priced between 70 cents and $1.50 per pound - and the fields of junked cars and appliances across the Rio Grande Valley have companies at the port expanding their businesses.

"We want to be an all purpose recycling company," said Richard Jaross, president of ESCO Marine. "The Rio Grande Valley is growing rapidly and we want to be involved in all aspects of the market."

ESCO was the first to turn on its shredder and set up feeder yards in Donna and Matamoros, and the company already has plans to build several more, Jaross said.

ESCO is better known for its ship breaking operation. While the gargantuan ships being dismantled dwarf the scale of its shredder, the machine could scarcely be more efficient.

While the ship recycling process can take months, ESCO's shredder can process between 300 and 400 cars per day or up to 15,000 tons.

And each car, depending on the size, generates between $400 and $500.

"Think of how much you bury every day," said Kris Wood, contracts and logistics specialist with ESCO. "This industry takes all sorts of items and inject that back into the economy. Every ton, every pound every ounce."

ESCO may have been the first, but it is no longer the only operation shredding recyclable items at the Port of Brownsville.

Nikhil Shah of All Star Metals has a separate shredding business called Advanced Recycling. Rio Grande Shredding Company also is in the vehicle shredding business at the port.

The logic behind shredding operations, Shah said, is to draw attention to the business opportunities in recycling.

"Once people are educated about the value of recycling," Shah said, "it automatically becomes a product on its own."

For Jaross, recycling isn't just about generating dollars and cents, it's also about making natural resources stretch.

"We want everybody to realize we don't have an endless supply of these resources," Jaross said.