Celebrating 60 years in the metal business next year, Macaulay Metals is the largest privately-owned metal recycling firm in New Zealand.
Managing director, Jeff Harris, has owned the company since 1995 with the main operation based in the Hutt Valley and yards in the North Island at Palmerston North, Rotorua and Whakatane.
Some 90 full-time employees buy, process and sell metal within New Zealand and throughout the world, working in conjunction with many suppliers as well as the public – who bring in old car batteries and household scrap – right through to major engineering and demolition companies.
A dedicated trucking fleet and mobile projects team working on a number of successful demolition and decommissioning contracts means that you see Macaulay
Metals operating anywhere in the country and it is this variety of work that the company says makes the industry so interesting and rewarding.
Macaulay Metals has been involved with major projects in a variety of industry sectors and has developed specialised methodologies for safely and efficiently demolishing and processing a range of infrastructure assets from oil storage tanks, to transformers, to railway carriages and everything in between.
Of course, loading the metal on the truck is only part of the job. The majority of processing happens at the yard with a range of equipment used depending on the product. Getting the metal export ready can involve the use of the cable granulator, a 1000 tonne compression shear (the biggest of its kind in New Zealand) or a high-density baler. These machines enable a better quality of product to be loaded more efficiently into shipping containers and are looked after in-house by a team of engineering staff.
The team at Macaulay Metals is passionate about metal recycling – the oldest form of recycling in the world. Many businesses are unaware that their metal by-products are not only a valuable income stream but something that can be diverted from landfill.
Almost all metal products can be recycled, and the environmental benefits of recycling are obvious: significantly less energy is used to recycle metal than to source it from mining activities.
It is clear that metal recycling is here to stay, and Macaulay Metals will continue to operate with the values of honesty, fairness and integrity that they are known for.
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