National News: Uber Recycling: A Day at a Scrap Metal Yard :: ::

Tag : melting metals
Wednesday, July 30, 2008 - 12:00 AM
By Jonathan Thompson

MONTROSE, CO - A long the banks of the Uncompahgre River in western Coloradosits an old red Volkswagen squareback. Its windows have been shotout, but the body isn't too beat up, and the old stereo's still inthe dash. It looks like it could be a sweet ride with a littlework.

Garry Fulks doesn't see it that way, though. To him, this classicautomobile is nothing more than a hunk of steel, a bit of copper,some aluminum and a bunch of "fluff" -- the non-metallicpieces of the car. Like the hundreds of tons of old washingmachines, pipes and other objects piled nearby, this car is goingnowhere but the crusher. Then it will be trucked off to theshredder to be ground up like corn meal. It probably weighs about aton and a half. Approximate value: $150. "I don't getsentimental about these things," says Fulks.

For 35 years, Garry and his wife, Diann, have owned and operatedRecla Metals, o­ne of the biggest purveyors of scrap metal inthis part of the state. To them, the world is either metal orfluff, with the good stuff either ferrous ' it sticks to a magnet,like steel -- or non-ferrous, like copper or aluminum. And nomatter how beat-up, rusted or old it is, the metal can all bechopped up, melted down and reused.

Business is booming for the Fulks. In fact, scrap has become abillion-dollar industry, driven in part by the same high metalprices that have nudged the West's dormant mines from theirslumber. The mining boom is likely to leave the region even moremessed up than before. The scrap boom, o­n the other hand, willhelp clean it up a bit, as backyard junk heaps are exchanged forcash.

"This is an extraordinarily green business," Diann says."And it has been since before it was vogue to be green."

The scrap yard's 90-ton machinery dwarfs mere cardboard-gathering,can-collecting mortals. Recla and its 22 employees classify,"densify," bale and ship -- that is to say, recycle --some 10,000 tons of metal each year. Nationally, over 1 milliontons of copper is scrapped and recycled each year -- more than isscraped out of the earth by miners -- along with 200 millionautomobiles and 800,000 tons of aluminum cans.

On this chilly March day, a bundled-up employee dumps bag after bagof beer and soda cans into a big contraption that gobbles them up,then spits out colorful, shiny "biscuits" that areconsolidated into 2,500-pound bales.

"Those cans," says Garry, "are gonna go right backinto the can business." Each bale that goes back into thesystem allows more than four tons of bauxite (aluminum ore) to beleft in the earth. Recycling aluminum also uses about 90 percentless energy than creating cans from virgin aluminum. (In spite ofall of this, o­nly about 52 percent of aluminum cans arerecycled in the U.S. today, compared to 68 percent in 1992.)

Each shiny bale will net Recla about $2,500 o­n today's scrapmarket. That's about three times what the same cans would have beenworth a few years ago, mostly because of high demand: China andIndia need more metal to support their whirlwind growth. Fulkspoints to a huge pile of rusted steel, o­ne side of which seemsto be bleeding dozens of horseshoes, and says the whole
thing is bound for the Pacific Rim.

The boom comes at a price, though, namely theft: In recent years,construction sites, railroad crossings and air conditioners havebeen raided by burglars for the copper inside. Thieves even Sawzallcars' catalytic converters to get at the iota of platinum hiddeninside. Recla hasn't been immune. This winter, high-dollar goodssuch as copper wire had a tendency to disappear at night, which iswhy there's now razor wire around the whole yard and an extraenclosure around the copper. Recla ships it off as quickly as itcan, by sealed truck, not railroad car.

"When the price is as expensive as it is, it's not good tokeep an inventory o­n hand," says Garry.

It's not just metal prices that cause the flow of metal tofluctuate. Western Colorado's rapid growth means more peopledisposing of more stuff. And as real estate values shoot up, sodoes the volume of scrap: When an old farm sells for big bucks, thenew owners are prone to demolish the decrepit house (with itscopper pipe and wire and aluminum siding) to make room for a fancymountain mansion. And newcomers tend to prefer snazzy landscapingto all those broken-down cars and farm implements that have beenmelting into the earth for decades.

But it also increases the pressure o­n the business. As thetown gentrifies, the riverfront land where industrial uses wereo­nce commonly located gains a different value. There's now abike path running along the river, just across from the yard. Andthe people who frequent the path don't always appreciate the subtleaesthetics of a 180,000-pound shear clipping apart a transmissionlike a toenail.

"There's people who know we serve a purpose," says Fulks."Then there's some who want us gone. They just don't give arat's ass."

The author is HCN's editor.

This article first appeared in High Country News hcn.org whichcovers the West's communities and natural-resourceissues.