Quality Management System Assistance Maintains Sales for Metal Processor

Founded in 2008, Ecovery is a North American leader of non-ferrous metal processing, primarily focusing on copper and aluminum bearing scrap in Loxley, Alabama. Ecovery has four processing lines that can extract and repackage raw material through a process of shredding, granulation, and separation into copper chops, aluminum sows, and aluminum shreds. Additionally, their facility houses a rotary and reverb furnace where they can melt and cast various grades of primary and secondary aluminum into recycled secondary ingots (RSI) or cones.  Ecovery processes more than 12,000,000 pounds of material per month. 

Ecovery is certified to the ISO 9001:2015, ISO 14001:2015, and RIOS:2016 standards. Ecovery has some customers who require them to maintain the certification to continue their business engagements; thus, maintaining certification is critical to Ecovery’s operations.  Additionally, many standards are recognized worldwide and Ecovery has begun entering international markets so having the certifications has proven beneficial. 

 

To maintain certification, the standard requires that companies perform internal audits to verify that their integrated management system conforms to the specified requirements. Due to this, Ecovery requested a subject matter expert from ATN, part of the MEP National Network™, come onsite and provide an internal audit of these systems. As part of the internal audit, Ecovery was presented with separate reports for each system noting any non-conformances to the standard as well as any opportunities for improvement.

ATN has an established, ten-year relationship working with Ecovery on their management systems as their exclusive annual auditor. As in previous years, ATN performed a two-day audit to ISO 9001:2015, ISO 14001:2015, and RIOS:2016 of Ecovery’s quality, environmental, health and safety management system.  By completing the internal audit, Ecovery was able to retain sales that could have been lost had their certifications not been retained.