The following is a transcript of the Dec. 19, 2025, episode of Public Power Now. Learn more about subscribing to Public Power Now at Publicpower.org/Podcasts. Some quotes may have been edited for clarity.
Paul Ciampoli
Welcome to the latest episode of Public Power Now. I'm Paul Ciampoli, APPA's News Director.
Our guest on this episode is Jeff Shaver, Investment Recovery Analyst at Arizona Public Power Utility Salt River Project.
He's here to provide details on how SRP is recycling old power lines and giving new life to previously unrecyclable material.
Jeff, thanks for joining us on the podcast.
Jeff Shaver
Hello, Paul. Thank you for the privilege of allowing me to be here today.
Paul Ciampoli
Jeff, just to get our conversation started, could you provide an overview of SRP's program to recycle old power lines? And also, how long has the utility been recycling old power lines?
Jeff Shaver
Yeah, happy to start there. We have actually had utility recycling of our power lines on scale since the early 1990s.
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.
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 my goals is to divert 75% of my office waste from landfills by 2035, and then 100% by 2050.
On the other side, I am to divert 95% of our industrial waste from the landfills by 2035 and 100% by 2050. And so these are fairly aggressive goals, and we work adamantly to advance our recycling initiatives. And just to give an example, we diverted 12,000 tons of material from the landfills last year.
And so we're making good progress in this. Now, specific to our 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 my yard, my operation, and we get roughly two semi trucks worth of power lines every week. Some of the power lines we get 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.
We could do over 300 different types of parts for our line hardwares and that is an idea of my group. Along with 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.
Paul Ciampoli
This is what spurred my thought in terms of inviting you on onto the podcast. What initially caught my eye is the fact that SRP recently provided a tour to media related to the power line recycling efforts, including the utility's state-of-the-art granulator machine.
I'm not familiar with what a granulator machine does exactly. I'm sure some of our listeners are aware, but for those who are not, could you describe how this machine works?
Jeff Shaver
A granulator can also be called a cable chopper. And so it's 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.
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.
And in the beginning of 2025, we did what we would call 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.
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. And as the valley grows, we now have a million customers.
And we've positioned ourself to be able to develop and grow along with them. As an example, if you were to try to start a system like this now, it would be a lot harder to centralize the material and the volume and so we've been able to position ourselves very well to grow.
Paul Ciampoli
SRP has noted that in the case of cable jacketing, it's studying cutting edge recycling techniques to put it to sustainable use. Can you offer additional details on this?
Jeff Shaver
We work with Arizona universities, and my favorite program is with Arizona State University, and we are taking our cable jacketing scraps that come out of the granulator, this pelletized cable jacketing, and we're able to turn it from a cable jacket into a new valuable resource.
And so the cable jacketing is actually a plastic that's called cross-linked polyethylene and it's really durable, it's really hardy, and in its normal form, it's unrecyclable.
Arizona State University has been able to take this and create a mixture and heat the mixture up really fast, really hot and when you do that, you carbonize the plastic, and it turns the crosslink polyethylene into flash graphene and flash graphene is a superconductor, kind of a newer material.
It can be used in concrete and construction. It can be used in the manufacturing of sensors and electronics. It's used in the manufacturing of electric vehicle batteries and energy storage batteries. And then it can also be added to composites to reinforce plastics and metals. And we're finding more and more uses for this as the market develops.
And we successfully created the flash graphene from our cable jacketing last semester. And this semester, we are increasing the volume and scaling that up to be able to do it in larger batches at a time. And that's just one of our projects.
We also have another project with the University of Arizona and in that one, we're working directly with concrete in our cable jacketing.
And we thought, well, what happens if we replace some of the rock aggregate that you put into concrete when you make it? What happens if you replace that with cable jacketing?
And we've been studying that for several semesters. What we found is that it makes the concrete lighter -- that's very important to the concrete manufacturers. It's a very heavy product, very expensive to transport. And so this is a lighter product, and it has improved water resistance because of the plastic cable jacketing.
And when you pour it out into the field, it forms into a mold and is very easy to work with, which is called slump, and it [it’s] easier to work with slump than traditional concrete. And in the most current semester of that project, we are actually going to be digging a few trenches and pouring in this mix and testing its performance and durability exposed to the elements over time.
Paul Ciampoli
It's just another great example of how public power utilities collaborating with universities in the relevant state really can yield a lot of benefits, whether it's for what you just described or obviously a lot of other activities.
Jeff Shaver
Yeah, Paul, the flash graphing project, SRP hopes to be the first utility in the country to develop that project at scale. And I think it's going to advance the recycling market in the United States forward through this project and everyone will be able to benefit and support their diversion goals through this.
Paul Ciampoli
You may have alluded to this or touched upon this to some degree already, but what are the environmental benefits of SRP's recycling old power lines?
Jeff Shaver
What we find are the benefits is that 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.
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.
And so we're 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.
From what I'm seeing, these things are increasing in their demand and their commodity price. But that's not the only thing that SRP does to help our ecosystem and Arizona.
We have other unique recycling programs that other companies don't quite utilize like us. Examples being my 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. And even the tires from our automobiles get sent to a company that will palletize them and make new tires. And so we're always looking to expand our programs of recycling and environmental impact.
Paul Ciampoli
I don't have to tell you that customers are always front of mind in terms of public power utilities. So against that backdrop, I wanted to give you the opportunity to describe how SRP customers benefit from the power line recycling effort.
Jeff Shaver
Our entire team, the investment recovery team at SRP, we were made to create value for the company and to reduce costs internally and we've done really well at that.
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.
Paul Ciampoli
I was just curious if you know how common the practice of recycling old power lines is across the U.S. ?
Jeff Shaver
I have looked into this, Paul. It's not a very common practice at all I've found. There's only a handful or two of electric utilities that have this type of machinery in house to recycle power lines, refurbish line hardware.
All of these machines that we've seen too are unique custom systems, so there's no two that are exactly alike. They're all their own individual system based on how the utility operates.
In recent years, we've found some others, and we've compared our setup and compared their setup, and we've been able to develop together and make our systems more efficient.
We've also seen a huge increase in interest in developing these systems fresh from other utilities, and we'll share what we do.
We'll allow industry colleagues to come visit SRP and see the operation. We'll discuss our successes, our hurdles, and help them get up to speed in line processing and cable chopping. But it's definitely not common now.
But if you were to look forward 10 years, it'll probably be very common, mostly due to the value of aluminum and copper now. They're just becoming more and more expensive as time goes and the operation eventually pays for itself and just makes a lot of sense.
Paul Ciampoli
Well, Jeff, this has been a really, really fascinating conversation. I learned a great deal about a topic that I really going into this knew really nothing about.
So I wanted to really thank you again for taking time to speak with us and I know our listeners will derive a lot of value from this conversation. And I would also like to extend to you an invitation to return. I know your portfolio is large in terms of your responsibilities, so we could obviously talk about other topics as well.
Jeff Shaver
Thank you for that opportunity, Paul. I would love to take you up on that and appreciate you allowing me to share how SRP runs our operation today and look forward to our future collaboration, sir.
Paul Ciampoli
Thanks for listening to this episode of Public Power Now, which is produced by Julio Guerrero, Graphic and Digital Designer at APPA. I'm Paul Ciampoli and we'll be back next week with more from the world of public power.
