Pacific Recycling’s founder, Rod Schultz, has spent the last half-century building what is now one of the Pacific Northwest’s leading producers of recycled metals. Born and raised in Salem, Oregon, Rod grew up working in and learning about the industry with his father.
What started with just one truck as a haul-away service has grown into a sophisticated, high-tech, 21-acre recycling operation in Eugene, Oregon. Still 100% family-owned and operated, PRI employs a full-time workforce of 75 people and recycles over 200 million pounds of metal every year. In 2023, we expanded to Klamath Falls and White City, to serve the communities of Southern Oregon.
The beating heart of our recycling operation is the shredder, one of only a handful of its size in the Pacific Northwest. You can think of this process as manufacturing in reverse, or demanufacturing. This series of systems efficiently downsizes and automatically separates metallic from non-metallic materials.
Whole automobiles, appliances, and any other light-gauge commercial, industrial, and consumer goods are fed via conveyor into the shredding chamber where a series of high-velocity hammers break the material into pieces about the size of a baseball or smaller. This process is driven by two large electric motors with a combined 4,000 horsepower, and in the case of a whole automobile takes less than a minute. With impressive efficiency, the shredder can process up to 140 net tons of material per hour. That’s the equivalent of about 90 cars! Once the material is broken down, it is automatically sorted by type and size, resulting in clean, dense, uniform metals ready for melting and manufacturing into new products.
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