In an interview with the American Public Power Association, Jeff Shaver, Investment Recovery Analyst at Arizona public power utility Salt River Project, details how SRP is recycling old power lines and giving new life to previously unrecyclable material, as well as how those efforts create benefits for the environment and SRP customers.
“We have actually had utility recycling of our power lines on scale since the early 1990s,” he said in an episode of APPA’s Public Power Now podcast.
“We were at the forefront of this process and procedure because we saw the value in preserving our resources. And along with that, it's owned by our Investment Recovery team.”
Shaver said: “We have an organization of roughly 20 people, and our goal is to maximize efficiency and reduce environmental impacts of SRP. Through this, SRP has established sustainability goals for us, called our 2035 sustainability goals, and my group owns two of them. One of our goals is to divert 75% of…office waste from landfills by 2035, and then 100% by 2050.”
On the other side, “We are to divert 95% of our industrial waste from the landfills by 2035 and 100% by 2050.”
He noted that in 2024, “we diverted 12,000 tons of material from the landfills.”
With respect to power lines, SRP keeps containers all over the Valley, “whether that's substations, service centers, power plants, and our line workers, when they have cable scraps or retired power lines, they put them in these containers.”
And when the containers fill up, “they come to our yard, our operation, and we get roughly two semi-trucks worth of power lines every week.”
Shaver points out that some of the power lines that come in are new, “but there's not enough length left on the reel to use that and take that out into the field and so when we have new cable on the reel that's under threshold, we'll make the hand coils out of that, which are job specific cable runs that we keep at the warehouse and our field can just grab and go with that.”
Along with that, “we'll refurbish line hardware too, where our line workers will put retired line hardware into these containers as well and bring that back to my yard, and we refurbish those. We sandblast, refurbish, clean up, and reintroduce and reuse line hardware at SRP.”
Shaver noted that “we run public auctions for our industrial equipment and our office equipment and we count all of this for our diversion from landfill to meet our 2035 sustainability goals.”
Recycling Efforts Include State-of-the-Art Granulator Machine
SRP in late 2025 provided a tour for media related to the power line recycling efforts, including the utility's state-of-the-art granulator machine.
A granulator is a machine that “you feed cable into, and it chops it, granulates it, and separates all the materials of a traditional cable and so we have been able to do around 1,000 tons worth of aluminum and copper through our old granulator system. And we've been doing it since the '90s,” Shaver noted.
“We've made a lot of refinements and advancements along the way, and we've had to grow along with the Valley. Back in the 1990s, the Valley was a much smaller place in terms of people and economic impact, but it's grown substantially and so we've upgraded our equipment along the way.”
At the start of 2025, the utility completed a cutting edge next generation advancement.
“We incorporated not just a larger machine that can handle twice as much cable, but we also put in software that can monitor the system real time, and so we get real time visibility as material moves through the system,” Shaver said.
“And along with that, we can address problems and hurdles and keep the system running longer and so we are expecting to do about double the amount of cable with our new system. And through that, we can continue our growth.”
Environmental Benefits
Shaver also detailed the environmental benefits of SRP's recycling of old power lines.
“The materials that we're sorting out and chopping up, we're reducing demand for mining more copper and aluminum and so that's one benefit,” he noted.
“Along the way, as we've separated these materials, it's allowed us to study the cable jacketing further and advance its recyclability, which is important.”
Along with that, “when you recycle things like aluminum, copper, and other metals, it saves a lot of energy, upwards of 90 to 95% of the energy compared to mining these resources from raw ore and processing them.”
SRP is reducing the demand and footprint of the energy needs for mining “on that and the all-encompassing benefit is going to be the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions overall. I do not expect aluminum or copper to decrease in demand as time goes on,” he said. “From what I'm seeing, these things are increasing in their demand and their commodity price.”
Shaver pointed out that SRP has other unique recycling programs.
An example involves treated wood poles. “When SRP is done with our utility poles, we actually send those to New Mexico to be used as poles on farms and as animal habitats on farms. And then when we clear the lines from trees -- you get tree growth into power lines, and you have to go around trimming those constantly. We take those tree trimmings, and we have them mulched to be used for landscaping.”
Some other unique programs “are our wood reel refurbishment. We don't get rid of wood reels when we're done with them. We send them back to be refurbished, respooled, and sent back to SRP.”
Customer Benefits
Shaver also described how SRP customers benefit from the power line recycling effort.
The investment recovery team at SRP was formed to create value for the utility and to reduce costs internally “and we've done really well at that,” he said.
“By recycling these cables and separating them into the aluminum and copper, you get a larger value for those commodities when you have them in volume and single stream and so we're able to generate a lot more revenue for our customers that's reinvested back into SRP.”
Additionally, on top of recycling the lines, “our line hardware refurbishment process returns five, 6,000 various parts to be reused every year at SRP and then using hand coil line runs when they're low threshold on the reel. All of these little processes add up to the grand effort that SRP uses to manage our expenses and it's a broader strategy to keep our rates stable and some of the lowest in the Southwest at that.”
