Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. (Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Carter Driscoll with Capstone Investments.
Carter Driscoll - Capstone Investments
Congratulations on excellent job on the cost side. I wanted to start with one of the comments you made, James, to make sure I heard it correctly when you talked about the cost reductions that you’ve identified. I was under the impression that when we been discussing those numbers somewhere in the low-30 range, $30 million range. Did I hear you correctly say, it was closure to $43 million range?
James Hensler
The list keeps getting adjusted as we identify new initiatives and in the current list of initiatives, we’d value as 43. We will get all of that this year, but given where we are in the year, we would expect to certainly get some of that here before the end of the year.
Carter Driscoll - Capstone Investments
Could you break it? With Barnwell, obviously, you’ve had ongoing reduction, is still the weak construction market and other areas that you are still being bid out. Is there anything specific like, continued headcount, pairing, could you break it out just a little bit more for me?
Bob Scherich
A big portion of where the saving is coming from is continued savings on the purchased feed side, where we’ve been able to continue to maintain relatively low prices there. Another big portion is that, as we’ve been able to ramp our EAF dust processing, we are taking a greater and greater portion of that directly to our smelter rather than going through our Palmerton facility for calcining and there is some significant savings associated with that.
We’re also realizing the full benefits now of having the Bartlesville facility essentially sitting idle and that is just continuing to generate some significant benefits for us. And with some other process modifications we’ve made, we’ve been realizing significant maintenance savings and we’ve also made permanent labor reductions in some of our recycling facilities which we’re beginning to realize the benefits from.
Carter Driscoll - Capstone Investments
Next question. Incrementally you mentioned that you may be seeing some light in the tire market, do you think that was impacted by the cash for clunkers? Do you think there really was a bottoming out process in the automotive industry, could you shed a little light there on what you’re seeing?
Jim Hensler
One, I don’t what impact cash for clunkers has had on it, we hardly measure that. We are seeing that miles driven are starting to pick up again and we had a period there where year-over-year numbers were trending downward, but that seems to have changed direction here. So, that has a fairly significant impact on replacement tire sales.
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