Museum pays tribute to recycling pioneers • Recycling International

The Proletarian / Photo: Smithsonian Museum

The world-renowned Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC has acquired an important piece of recycling history with the donation of a section of a 1961 shredder.

The Prolerizer, which can shred a vehicle or other large consumer durables in minutes, is considered a revolutionary invention by the Proler family of Houston, USA.

Intensive work

Their equipment made it possible to recycle cars and other durable goods that had reached the end of their life. Previously, vehicle recycling was a labor-intensive process involving blowtorches and alligator shears, as abandoned cars became a widespread problem in American cities.

The Proler family came up with a way to crush cars, extract the clean steel, and send it back to steel mills to create new products. The main invention was a rotor with many hammers. Powered by a large motor, it could shred entire vehicles into fist-sized pieces that could be separated into ferrous and nonferrous materials, providing steel mills with a higher quality of scrap metal for recycling.

Transformation

Ben Proler (1894–1970) started the family business in the 1920s and, with the help of his sons Izzy, Sammy, Hymie and Jackie, transformed their local scrap metal dealership in Houston into Proler Steel, a publicly traded global company.

Advantage Metals Recycling decommissioned its 1961 Prolerizer, nicknamed Deborah, in the summer of 2024 and donated a representative portion of the machine and early archival documents to the Smithsonian.