Upstate Shredding

Upstate wants all grades of scrap metal — whether you’re an individual with an old appliance or a mixed load of scrap metals, a scrap dealer, a business producing scrap metal or insulated wire or a municipal recycling center, you’ll get the best deal at Upstate. End-of-life cars, trucks and other light and heavy vehicles, light iron, HMS, P and S, machine shop turnings, copper, brass, aluminum, and all other metals are welcomed at Upstate.

Upstate – Ben Weitsman wants your scrap metals, pays the highest prices and pays the same day. Upstate wants all grades of scrap metal — whether you’re an individual with an old appliance or a mixed load of scrap metals, a scrap dealer, a business producing scrap metal or insulated wire or a municipal recycling center, you’ll get the best deal at Upstate. End-of-life cars, trucks and other light and heavy vehicles, light iron, HMS, P and S, machine shop turnings, copper, brass, aluminum, and all other metals are welcomed at Upstate.

Working with Upstate, you’ll find transactions fast, courteous and leave with a smile. Upstate wants you to come back soon with more. Remember, we are open 7 days a week! Wholesale customers can drop off at our Owego processing facility. Retail customers can drop off at any Ben Weitsman feeder yard. Please visit the contact or location pages of this website for a list of all of our locations. If you can’t get to Upstate, we’ll come to you. Our trucks are on the road throughout the northeast, or we’ll be happy to drop off a container at your location. As the largest volume process of scrap metal on the East Coast and one of the largest in the country, Upstate consistently pays the highest prices of any metal processor in the Northeast. Our high volume, high-technology metal processing plant means higher scrap prices for you.

We have roll off container service available for larger quantities of scrap! We provide 7 day a week service and can drop off and pick up promptly from your location through our large fleet of brand new containers and trucks! Please see our container sizes below and give us a call at 607-687-7777 to schedule container service today

As one of the largest recycling centers on the East Coast, we export all over the world. With our extensive network of company-affiliated sources and a large production capacity that is continually expanding, Upstate Shredding – Ben Weitsman guarantees consistent, high quality supplies to meet your production requirements.

Our in-house staff is highly experienced in export markets. Our staff of logistics, traffic, finance and contract administrators has the knowledge and experience to ensure that containers are properly loaded, documented and shipped to reach your plant quickly and cost-efficiently. Upstate Shredding – Ben Weitsman offers container loading as well as bulk shipments for export. We offer 40 and 20 foot containers out of New York and New Jersey ports and are able to load vessels up to 32,000 metric ton out of the Port of Albany.

Our nonferrous commodities at our Ben Weitsman locations include:

• All grades of copper
• All grades of aluminum
• All grades of brass
• All grades of stainless steel
• Electric motors
• Sealed units
• Automotive radiators
• Aluminum copper radiators
• Insulated wire
• Batteries
• Lead
• Wheel weights

Our nonferrous commodities at the shredder include:

• Zorba
• Shredder pickings
• ASR recovered wire

Upstate Shredding – Ben Weitsman generate sales of approximately $750 million dollars per year. With nearly 400 employees, Upstate is headquartered on a 17-acre environmentally certified facility in Owego, and operates yards in Owego (2 locations), Binghamton, Brant, Ithaca (2 locations), Syracuse,  Scranton, Rochester, Jamestown, Hornell, Allegany and Albany, NY (port facility and retail scrap yard), and Scranton and New Castle, PA.

As the East Coast’s largest privately owned scrap metal processor and recycling center, and one of the largest operations of its type in the United States, Upstate – Ben Weitsman will process approximately 1 million tons of ferrous and 250 million pounds of nonferrous in 2014. Upstate’s metal shredding and separation operation handles all types of ferrous and non-ferrous scrap metals: automobiles, trucks, appliances, machines and scrap generated from industrial production.

Upstate’s leading-edge process ensures the production of clean, bulk, scrap metal commodities that are sold to foundries, mills and manufacturers domestically and around the world where they are reprocessed to make new products.

Upstate Shredding recently installed one of the most advanced nonferrous separation systems in the world. In an industry leading effort to promote worker safety and protect the environment, most Upstate processing operations are performed indoors. Upstate Shredding continually works with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the U.S EPA to enhance environmental safety to meet or exceed standards.

Upstate can reduce a whole vehicle in seconds to component streams of ferrous and nonferrous metals, glass, plastics and fabrics.   Processing approximately 8,300 tons of ferrous scrap per month, and 3.8 million pounds of non-ferrous per week, the materials are recycled for useful purposes, kept out of landfills and help improve the environment.

In the Northeast, Upstate consistently pays the highest prices for scrap metals and pays upon receipt.  Upstate buys scrap metals from a variety of individuals, scrap metal dealers and manufacturers. Materials are collected by a large fleet of company trucks and by hundreds of roll-off containers left for collection at customer sites. Customers also bring scrap metals to any one of our feeder yards, open seven-days a week for convenience. All raw scrap is sent to the central facility in Owego for processing into variety commodities ready to be recycled.

Upstate Shredding’s Owego facility is one of the most technologically sophisticated in the world. Unlike most other processors, Upstate’s processing equipment is housed indoors in a 200,000 square-foot complex. This large investment was made for a number of reasons: to better protect advanced processing equipment and allow higher quality control standards; to improve worker safety and implement best practices; and to control storm water run-off to prevent groundwater contamination. The entire Owego plant is serviced by an elaborate storm sewer system. Run-off is piped to an on-site water treatment plant. Upstate exceeds the high standards of the U.S. EPA and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, and was the first “green” plant of its type in New York State.

The Owego plant is equipped with:

A new 10,000 hp Riverside Engineering 122 inch Mega-Shredder. This new generation machine can shred complete automobiles, trucks and motor blocks at the rate 450 tons per hour. It is equipped with the latest electronics, such as cruise-control and automatic feed adjustments to increase productivity and reduce energy consumption. Weighing over 500 tons, the new machine nearly doubled production capacity. A new Polishing Drum Magnet System that automatically removes electric motors containing copper armatures from vehicles and eliminates the dangerous, inefficient practice of hand-picking motors from fast moving conveyor belts. It results in virtual total recovery and improves worker safety. Four new Dynamic Ferrous Metal Separation Systems use Eddy Current technology to segregate nonferrous metals like aluminum, copper and brass from ferrous metals such as iron and steel. A new Dual-Energy X-Ray Separator System identifies metal particles by atomic density and segregates aluminum from heavier metals, such as zinc, copper and brass.

Six new Sandjet Dry Heavy Media Plants remove copper from aluminum. New Optic Color Sorter technology separates yellow metals from red metals. Each unit uses several ultra high-speed, high-resolution video cameras. Images of metals traveling on a conveyor belt go to a computer that analyzes metals by shape and color to trigger automatic separation.

A new $8 million dollar Wire Recovery System–a revolutionary method of recovering copper encased in plastic insulation. This technology removes copper from small diameter wires found in autos and appliances that was previously uneconomical to recycle and went to landfills. It uses inductive metal detection combined with near-infrared scanning to remove wires from the waste stream, separates insulation from copper and granulates copper into a recyclable commodity. Recycled metals produced by Upstate are marketed domestically, but the majority is exported. Upstate has staff experts in export documentation and logistics, and has rail service directly from its yard. Upstate Shredding’s corporate mission is to extract every ounce of value from the scrap materials it processes, thereby able to pay its customers the highest prices for their scrap metals.

Recycling scrap metal is one of the great success stories of the industrial age. It not only preserves precious natural resources, but helps avoids mining, transport and smelting of new metals and the associated air pollution.  At Upstate, we use a multi-million dollar state-of-the-art mega-shredder to process end-of-life metal objects such as: automobiles, trucks, washers, dryers and scrap metals of every type, shape and size.

A huge spinning rotor with over 1000-pound hammers smashes everything into small pieces. Magnets remove ferrous metals (iron and steel). Upstate sells the recovered ferrous to steel mills and iron foundries around the world for reuse in new products. What remains after ferrous metals are extracted is called 'shredder fluff.' It gets sent over a complex conveyor system that incorporates a number of advanced technologies to recover a number of separated streams of nonferrous metals like aluminum, copper, brass, stainless steel and zinc which are also sold and recycled into new products.