Chongqing Huiren Non-Ferrous Metal Co., Ltd. – Can Flattener and Belt Conveyor Case Study

Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Wuxin Village, Jieshi Town, Banan District, Chongqing, Chongqing Huiren Non-Ferrous Metal Co., Ltd. (registered capital RMB 12 million) specializes in aluminum scrap recovery, the production and sale of aluminum alloy ingots and liquid aluminum, as well as the manufacturing of automotive and motorcycle components. As an above-designated-size industrial enterprise integrating secondary aluminum smelting with metal processing, the company is also licensed for in-house aluminum dross utilization and disposal — processing 106 tonnes of dross in 2023 — and was rated compliant in Banan District's 2025 hazardous waste standardization assessment.

For over two decades, Huiren's smelting workshop has run steadily without major issues. The real daily headaches, however, were outside in the scrap yard. Every summer, truckload after truckload of used beverage cans arrived at the gate. Light, fluffy, and bulky, a full truckload barely amounted to any tonnage, yet on the yard the cans piled up into hills of loosely tangled aluminum. Sun and rain took their toll, but the real trouble came at charging time — loose cans fed slowly into the furnace and burned off heavily. Workers tried flattening them with forklifts running back and forth, achieving only partial results that cost time, fuel, and patience. As one crew member put it: “If the cans aren't flattened, the yard looks full but the furnace stays hungry. If they're not flattened right, half of them burn off and the slag is full of aluminum.”

In September 2024, Huiren commissioned an HS-CF800 can flattener and a matching belt conveyor from Gongyi Haoxing Machinery, dedicated to pre-furnace UBC preparation. The flattener presses fluffy cans into uniformly thin flakes, which the conveyor then feeds directly into the storage bin. This seemingly simple setup has turned a crude process — driving forklifts over piles of cans — into a streamlined in-line operation. Post-flattening, the can volume shrinks dramatically, more than doubling effective yard storage capacity. Furnace charging speed has notably increased, and melt loss has dropped significantly. After over half a year, General Manager Shen did the arithmetic: between the recovered yard space, reduced forklift hours, and metal saved from burn-off, the flattener has already paid for itself several times over.