May/June 2011
In the past 14 years, Len Shaw and his team have made CARI a force to be reckoned with as the leading supporter and defender of Canada’s recycling industry.
By Kent Kiser
In 1995, the Canadian Association of Recycling Industries was limping along with just one employee, $150,000 in the bank, only 160 member companies, and little to offer them in terms of membership benefits. It wasn’t functioning as a “proper association,” says Len Shaw, who at the time was working on metal and mineral issues for the Canadian government. He didn’t hesitate to point out the association’s shortcomings to its elected leaders. “Look, you’re running CARI like a country club,” he recalls telling them. “If that’s what you want, fine, but if you want to get serious and run a real association, I’d love to come onboard and see what we could do.” They took him up on his offer, and the results speak for themselves. CARI now has 260 member companies, more than $750,000 in the bank, a variety of membership benefits (more on them later), and three staff members. Equally important, Shaw says, CARI is recognized as a professional association—or, as he puts it, “the voice of the Canadian recycling industry.” The organization has come a long way, though Shaw has even higher goals for its future. It has been a fascinating journey, much like the life and career of Shaw, its energetic, peripatetic leader.
A Life on the Move
Though Shaw was born in Canada—in Victoria, British Columbia, in June 1946—and he has always been a Canadian citizen, he spent the majority of his youth elsewhere due to his father’s job with Air Liquide (Montréal), an international provider of gas products. “I went to 10 schools in 11 years in three different countries before I got out of high school,” he recalls. In that period, his family lived in Houston; Lake Charles, La.; Swansea, Wales; and several cities in Canada, including Hamilton and Sudbury, Ontario, as well as Montréal, which Shaw considers his hometown because of his family’s several stints there. The family even spent a summer in Cartagena, Spain. All that moving around didn’t bother Shaw—“I didn’t know anything else,” he says. In fact, it instilled in him a high capacity for life on the go, which is a good thing, considering he travels up to 36 times a year for CARI.
After finishing high school in Montréal, Shaw returned to Swansea, where he embarked on eight years of higher education at the University of Wales’ Swansea College, earning a bachelor of science in physical metallurgy, a master’s in process metallurgy, and a Ph.D. in stress corrosion. His studies introduced him to the benefits of using scrap in metal production—“Straightaway, I was aware of recycling,” he recalls—though he had no idea how important that knowledge would figure in his future career.
After completing his studies in 1972, Shaw entered the management program at British Steel Corp. in Cardiff, Wales. The company soon moved him into a purchasing position in which he bought “everything from rags to oxygen plants,” he says. Two years later, Shaw decided it was time for a change. It was 1974, and the UK economy “was going to hell in a hand cart,” so he, his wife, Wendy, and toddler son Jason moved to Montréal. There he found a position with Alcan International, a subsidiary of what was then Aluminum Co. of Canada (now Rio Tinto Alcan), as assistant to the vice president of patents and trademarks, a position he describes as a “hinge” between the firm’s patent lawyers and the scientists in its research lab. After three years, he changed jobs—and moved his family—once again, this time to Almonte, Ontario, a suburb 35 miles southwest of Ottawa, Canada’s capital city.
Shaw landed a civil-service job in the government’s Science Branch, procuring scientific studies for various government agencies. He held that position for 12 years before transferring to the Department of Industry (which is comparable to the U.S. Department of Commerce), working first on issues in the nonferrous metals industry and, later, covering all the metals and minerals industries. “My background in metallurgy was very useful there,” he says. It was during his eight years in that post that Shaw first came into contact with CARI.
His introduction to CARI came about when Canada signed the Basel Convention, an international treaty in which signatory nations agree not to export hazardous wastes to countries that don’t have the capacity to manage them. When Canada’s Department of Environment was tasked with developing regulations to implement the treaty, it created “a terrible proposal because it didn’t understand the scrap sector,” Shaw says. That prompted Stan Parker, then CARI’s executive director, and elected leaders Jon Kis of Intermetco (Hamilton, Ontario), Max Zalev of Zalev Brothers (Windsor, Ontario), and Jack Lazareck of General Scrap (Winnipeg, Manitoba) to visit Ottawa to voice their objections to the proposed regulations. Shaw, as the government’s metals representative, met with the CARI delegation and helped present their objections to the Department of Environment. “Then we spent two years fighting with that department to get something the scrap industry could live with from a regulatory perspective,” Shaw says.
Rebuilding the Association
About 18 months later, in spring 1995, Shaw assessed his career situation: He was a 20-year civil servant, and he had reached his “level of frustration with government—all the red tape and political silliness,” he says. So he picked up the phone one day and called Jon Kis. By that point, Stan Parker had left CARI, and the association was experiencing a rough patch. Shaw saw an opportunity, and he made Kis his offer to take CARI beyond its country-club status and transform it into a “real association.” Kis was intrigued, so he and Max Zalev had dinner with Shaw in Toronto to explore the possibilities. They decided to take advantage of a Canadian government program called Interchange Canada that allows civil servants to work in industry for a couple of years, and vice versa for industry executives. Shaw remained a civil servant for the two years while he worked full time for CARI, then in 1997 he left the civil service to join CARI as its executive director.
During his Interchange period, Shaw had defined several top priorities for the association: get it operating in a professional manner, raise the profiles of CARI and the Canadian scrap industry, and expand public—and government—education about the sector. At the time, he says, CARI wasn’t offering a lot of membership value, so he and Donna Turner, CARI’s sole previous staffer, set about to change that. They started the CARI Pulse, the association’s first regular newsletter, and a biannual magazine, Infinity. Shaw also used his government experience and connections to step up CARI’s lobbying efforts, which required a “cultural shift” among the association’s members, he says. At the time, the members generally subscribed to the philosophy of “Keep your head down, do your business, and that’s it,” Shaw explains. But he argued that the industry has a significant, positive story to tell, and it needed to “get out there and let people know.” Toward that end, CARI created a couple of educational videos on the value of recycling, one designed for students, the other for government officials. “This was to start the process of explaining our sector and its significance, especially regarding sustainability,” he says.
In 1997 Shaw created CARI’s first health insurance program, and the next year he added a property and casualty insurance program—“probably the most important program we’ve got,” he says, estimating that roughly a quarter of CARI members participate in it. In addition, he made Infinity a thrice-yearly publication and founded consumer’s night, a fall event that now draws more attendees than CARI’s annual summer convention.
Around 1999, CARI inked a deal with NASCO-OP (New Philadelphia, Ohio) to offer CARI’s members free access to that group’s cooperative buying service for equipment and supplies. More recently, the association has focused on beefing up its provincial chapters and launched its second e-newsletter, the short-format CARI Prompt, which comes out at the beginning of each month to complement the longer-format, mid-month CARI Pulse. On the educational front, CARI developed three guides for members: an environmental management handbook, human resources manual, and safety manual.
In sum, Shaw and Turner established over the years an admirable collection of benefits for CARI members, all designed to save members money, enhance their business opportunities, or both, Shaw says. Taken together, these benefits have “created value for members,” he says. “I truly think there’s considerable value in a CARI membership today.” This has translated into significant membership growth for CARI—from 160 member companies in 1995 to 260 today—as well as financial growth, with the association’s reserves swelling from $150,000 when Shaw started to $750,000 now.
As an aside, he notes that Infinity, which CARI stopped publishing in 2001, is the only benefit the association has discontinued during his tenure. Though the magazine covered its production costs, it didn’t cover the staff time and wasn’t driving membership growth, he explains. One other cost-managing effort pertains to the office arrangements of CARI’s three staffers—Shaw, Turner, and Shaw’s daughter Tracy, who handles communications and other association tasks. Each works from a different office, with the two Shaws working from their respective homes—Len in Almonte and Tracy in Ottawa—and Turner in CARI’s headquarters office in Ajax, Ontario, a suburb of Toronto. Why this arrangement? Saving money on rent is a big reason, but Shaw also notes that today’s technology makes it easy for them to work from remote locations while keeping in touch and living where they prefer. Shaw’s home base in Almonte, for instance, gives him easy access to Ottawa for his government work. He maintained a CARI office in Ottawa for four years, but he concluded it wasn’t a good value for the money. “I travel so much,” he explains, “so when I’m away, it doesn’t matter where I’m away from, but where I’m away to.”
Battling the Issues
As Shaw and Turner expanded CARI’s member benefits, he also focused considerable time on combatting what he views as the industry’s most significant problem: ignorance about recycling and the scrap recycling industry among the public and, especially, elected officials. “They lump waste and recycling together,” he says. This confusion creates numerous problems, including the passage of inappropriate regulations. “You have government officials who don’t understand that the waste industry rules are completely different than what’s needed for recycling,” Shaw says. Ignorance about the industry also leads elected officials to view scrap recyclers in the same light as pawn shops, which has resulted in onerous control-focused legislation to address the materials theft issue. “You can’t solve the problem that way, but they don’t see it,” he says.
The lack of understanding about how the recycling industry works also is evident in how most public recycling programs focus on collection, or the supply side, Shaw says. The public and government officials “don’t recognize that collection is only half of the equation,” he asserts. “If they put as much energy into the demand side of the equation, they wouldn’t need to worry about the supply; the industry would take care of that.” For instance, government entities could use their procurement policies much more effectively to boost demand for products with high recycled content and high recyclability.
Beyond the “ignorance issue,” as Shaw calls it, CARI grapples with other hot topics on the industry’s behalf, such as product stewardship, especially as it relates to extended producer responsibility. CARI adopted an EPR policy in June 2009 that says manufacturers should minimize the environmental impact of their products and maximize the material recovery of their end-of-life products; absorb the cost of handling their end-of-life products; and internalize those expenses like any other manufacturing costs. Also, any collection system developed for end-of-life products should include input from the scrap recycling industry and be based on the private-sector, competitive process—in other words, no flow control. Shaw has his hands full promoting this policy, especially considering that Ontario has already created a flow-control system for scrap electronics. Also, he must counter efforts to impose recycling fees in any EPR system because that creates “negative connotations for recycling.” When such fees arise, Shaw says it’s only fair for manufacturers to show the equivalent cost to the environment if a new product is made with primary materials to replace the old one.
Other issues on Shaw’s and CARI’s agendas include poor railroad service, the handling of automotive mercury switches, unexploded ordnance in the scrap stream, and materials theft. He’s also excited about a joint project CARI is doing with Natural Resources Canada, a government agency, to create an online map of all recycling facilities in the country. “We hope to launch the first part of this guide—on CARI member locations—in June and expand from there,” Shaw says.
On many issues, CARI works closely with associations for scrap recycling and other industries in Canada and elsewhere to find consensus. From his earliest days with CARI, Shaw says he made it his habit to reach out to other associations and find common ground. That was certainly the case in his relationship with ISRI. Two weeks after he started working with CARI in the Interchange program, he phoned then-ISRI Executive Director Herschel Cutler and asked to meet. Cutler agreed, so Shaw and Turner flew down to Washington, D.C., and spent the day at ReMA headquarters discussing association issues, the scrap recycling business, and “all the rest of it,” he says. CARI and ReMA have maintained a close working relationship ever since, he says. He and ReMA President Robin Wiener continue to meet once a year, and the two groups interact as needed throughout the year. “I’ve never had any difficulty picking up the phone, calling ISRI, and getting assistance,” Shaw says. “Everyone has always been extremely helpful.” During Shaw’s tenure, in fact, CARI and ReMA have joined forces on several projects, including a safety manual. ReMA created the manual, and CARI purchased the rights to “Canadianize” it for its members, he says. The two associations also have worked together on issues such as cargo securement and materials theft. In fact, it was a CARI chapter that first suggested the idea of creating a website that would give recyclers a forum to report materials theft. Shaw discussed the idea with Chuck Carr, ISRI’s vice president of member services, at an ReMA convention. ReMA “put this idea on steroids,” Shaw says, and created ScrapTheftAlert.com, which the two associations co-brand, with both of their logos on the home page. More recently, Shaw worked with Gary Bush, ISRI’s director of materials theft prevention, to draft an article on materials theft for the magazine of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (Ottawa).
Shaw is proud of the positive relationship he has helped forge between CARI and ISRI, but his proudest accomplishment, he says, is that CARI is “now recognized as a professional organization, the voice of recycling in Canada, and I don’t think it was before,” he says. “We set about trying to raise CARI’s profile. Now, government officials come to us to review documents or attend meetings related to recycling. The recognition side of it is there.”
Shaw is quick to spread the credit for CARI’s many accomplishments, saying “I’m not doing this all by myself.” He acknowledges the longtime contributions of Donna Turner as well as the support of CARI’s “progressive” presidents and board members during his 14 years with the association. And he points with pride to the addition of his daughter Tracy to CARI’s staff.
Despite CARI’s significant progress under Shaw’s leadership, there’s still plenty of work to do. Beyond the ongoing challenge of educating the public, Shaw and his team continue to focus on expanding CARI’s membership benefits, increasing its membership ranks, and potentially adding staff as the association grows. In the longer run, he would like to see Canada recognized as the global leader in recycling just as it’s recognized for its vast virgin resources such as oil, timber, and primary metals. “We’d love to see the minister of natural resources stand up in the House of Commons and become our champion by saying, ‘Canada is going to become the world leader in recycling.’” It’s an ambitious goal, to be sure, but the 65-year-old Shaw has no intention of retiring any time soon. “We keep telling them there’s value for Canada in earning that distinction,” he says—value that would carry over to the country’s recycling association and its members.
Kent Kiser is publisher and editor-in-chief of Scrap.
In the past 14 years, Len Shaw and his team have made CARI a force to be reckoned with as the leading supporter and defender of Canada’s recycling industry.