About us

“It’s unwise to pay too much, but it’s worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that’s all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do.
The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it can’t be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.”

John Ruskin
(8 février 1819 - 20 janvier 1900)

  • Builds furnaces and special equipment for recycling non-ferrous metals
    Our President built his first furnace in 1970, a de-ironing furnace for his father’s recycling business.
    In 2021, 51 years later, Dross Engineering has delivered 1392 installations.
    Dross Engineering only builds equipment for the recycling industry:

    ALUMINIUM / LEAD / ZINC / BRASS / BRONZE / COPPER

    The company’s engineers and technicians only think ‘Recycling’.
    The are very familiar with the whole range of scrap and know how to achieve the best yields.
    Specialisation is Dross Engineering’s strength.

  • In 1970, Jean Armabessaire, President of Dross Engineering, delivered the first ‘transportable’ de-ironing furnace.
    The furnace was shipped completely lined and ready to operate. This was a real innovation at the time because furnaces then did not have a casing and were built completely out of bricks.
    The first oil crisis forced furnace builders to develop new energy saving techniques as ‘good’ furnaces of the time consumed 150 litres of oil (or equivalent in gas) per tonne.
    Since then Dross Engineering has developed furnaces providing secondary smelters with ever increased performance and economy.

    In 1990 they produced their first pilot TRF (Tilting Rotary Furnace) inspired by a
    very old technique and applied to melting aluminium.
    The objective was to combine in a single furnace the advantages of several types of furnace: reverbs, dry hearths, and fixed axis rotaries; and above all to eliminate of greatly reduce the use of salt.
    Today over 10 furnace builders worldwide offer their customers tilting rotary furnaces or TRF. These ‘revolutionary’ furnaces can melt at record speed practically the whole range of aluminium scrap, with or without salt, and offering energy returns of 350 – 400 kW per tonne, some 4 times less the in 1970.
    Dross Engineering has a ‘honorable’ reference list with to-date some 90 TRF installed in 39 different countries.