JULY/AUGUST 2007
As populations expand toward previously industrial areas, scrapyards are finding that good neighbor relations are essential. A variety of measures can help yards ensure they’re welcome members of their community.
By Lindsay Holst
For most people, recycling begins and ends with the little bin at the end of the driveway. Sure, they recycle their office and household goods and buy products with recycled content, but the reality of an industrial scrap recycling facility is something they’d rather not face. Scrapyard neighbors in particular tend to see only the negatives of the business: noise, dust, traffic, and piles of scrap.
“We look at scrap and we see beauty,” says Jerry Simms, vice president of sales at Atlas Metal & Iron Corp. (Denver). “We see fewer resources being taken out of the earth, less strip mining, and better energy conservation, but our neighbors don’t always have that perspective, so the relationship can be problematic and testy right off the bat.”
Contributing to the problem is sprawl—the growth of cities, suburbs, and towns that results in residential and commercial development in previously remote or industrial areas. Scrap operations that have been in the same spot for decades might have new neighbors that hold them to higher standards—and these neighbors often have the ear of local government officials who are counting on the new development’s success.
Often, the complaints deal with aesthetics—the way the yard looks or the sound of equipment and scrap loading and unloading. Other complaints involve traffic, both the volume and the type of business coming in and out of the yard, whether it’s big trucks or small peddlers. Scrapyards are responding in a variety of ways, both proactive and reactive. Whether it’s getting involved in the community, changing the scrapyard design, or just landscaping the grounds, scrap operations are working to preserve good relations and open channels of communication between themselves and their neighbors.
Community ties
An important part of being a good neighbor, yard owners say, is being active in the community. If neighbors have met scrap company leaders through community activities, they are more likely to go to them directly if they have a problem.
Sam Hummelstein, the fourth-generation leader of Hummelstein Iron & Metal (Jonesboro, Ark.), credits his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather for establishing strong bonds with the Jonesboro community. He can even remember his mother dragging him around Jonesboro when he was a boy, putting up “Don’t be a litterbug” signs, he says. Today Hummelstein is active in his local chamber of commerce and Rotary Club, and he joined the downtown business association after the “Main Street” area underwent a recent redevelopment.
When it comes to neighbor relations, “a small community is always different than a large metropolitan area,” Hummelstein says. “It’s easier in a smaller community to be involved at all levels.” Though he calls the company’s involvement a sort of “enlightened self-interest,” he cautions that “folks will see right through you if it’s not sincere,” if you’re just there to promote your business or put in face time. Scrapyards must have a sincere desire to improve the quality of life of their communities, he says.
The counterpart to involvement is outreach—making neighbors more aware of what a scrapyard does and how it contributes to the community. In a session on community public relations at ISRI’s 2007 convention, Joanna Jiampietro, public relations director of Utica Alloys (Utica, N.Y.), said yards must undertake grass-roots outreach efforts in their communities. “For example, advertise national events like America Recycles Day year-round,” Jiampietro says. “Invite your police force, politicians, and other local groups for a tour of your facility,” which can clear up misperceptions and show that you have nothing to hide. “Start awards programs and essay contests geared toward recycling efforts at local high schools,” she adds.
Outreach also means building relationships with members of the media. When you try to avoid the press, “journalists will write the story without you,” Jiampietro says.
Sims Metal East’s good relationships with local environmental and community groups have served it well, says Regional EHS Manager Fred Cornell. A few years ago, one such group contacted the Jersey City, N.J., facility and said that pollutants from an adjacent property were leaking into the ocean. “We ultimately learned that the problem was a combined sewer overflow from a nearby facility unrelated to our operation,” Cornell says. “We reported back to the group, they [spread the word] to their constituents, and everyone won.” If not for the good relationship between the two parties, that group easily could have gone directly to the state’s environmental protection agency,
Cornell says. “An agency would have come into our facility thinking we caused the problem, and those are the types of inspections that can lead you down a path you don’t want to go down.”
Aesthetic considerations
Neighborhood standards change, and scrapyards sometimes need to change with them. When the Pulaski, Tenn., division of Tennessee Valley Recycling moved to its current location 57 years ago, it was “out in the country,” says Ted Lipman, co-chairman of TVR’s membership committee. Over the years, the company purchased land surrounding its facility to serve as a buffer, but the area couldn’t stay remote forever. “As time went on, [Pulaski’s] growth went in the direction of our yard’s location,” Lipman says. “We’re now in a light industrial area.”
As the city grew up around it, the company decided to give the facility a facelift that included hanging new signs, paving its roads, spreading mulch, installing a new fence and gate, and planting trees around the operation’s perimeter. TVR carefully considered every detail of the spruce-up, right down to the type of fence and the species of trees and perennial flowers it planted. The new fence, a chain-link variety about 10 feet high, was made opaque by strips of plastic woven between its links. But that wasn’t enough, explains Joel Denbo, TVR’s CEO.
“You put up a 10-foot-tall opaque fence so people don’t have to look at your facility at ground level, but then you’re criticized because your equipment or scrap pile is visible above the fence,” he says. So the company planted Leland cypress, an evergreen that grows to about 30 feet and forms a thick, opaque, sound-blocking barrier. Denbo had seen the trees surrounding an industrial facility that abutted residential areas while he was on a morning jog. “I’ve been afforded the opportunity to visit many of my colleagues around the country, and I’ve seen what they’re doing. Why reinvent the wheel?” he says. The county chamber of commerce was so impressed by the changes that it gave the facility its “Brighten Your Corner” award.
Denbo says the beautification was worth the $200,000-plus price tag.
“It reduces the aggravation level” of neighbors, he says, “and when the Boy Scouts, the schools, [and] the moms in the minivans come in to sell their cans, their impression of your facility will last. … All of these things help with your public persona over time.”
The company benefited as well. “We wanted to be a good neighbor to all of our local constituents,” Lipman says, “but we also wanted to be proud of our business.”
Sound policies
When developers built waterfront condominiums less than 1,000 feet from Sims Metal East’s facility, which has operated on a Jersey City pier for more than 40 years, it also had to adapt, Cornell says. “We had to be more thoughtful of the fact that we had neighbors now,” he says. “We had to change the way we ran our business.”
Noise complaints sprang up nearly as quickly as the condominiums had. Cornell even had the phone number of one woman programmed into his cell phone because she called every week to complain. Sims Metal officials arranged to meet with members of the condominium board to hear its concerns, which was the start of a lengthy process of negotiations and suggestions about how best to solve the noise problem.
Originally the company planned to install “a very large noise-barrier wall,” Cornell remembers. But the condominium board members were not pleased. “They said the wall was too big, that they would feel like they were at a movie theater,” he says. Taking that concern into account, Sims Metal installed smaller sound barriers, but it also determined that the best way to correct the problem would be to move the noise source as far from the condominiums as possible. The company postponed its planned installation of a megashredder so it could acquire land and move its existing shredder to the other side of the pier.
At the same time, the facility made small operational changes, such as changing which side of the scrap pile employees work on. “If it’s nighttime, you don’t want to work on the side of the pile that faces the neighbors,” Cornell says. Switching sides deflected noise in the other direction, reducing the need for additional noise barriers.
Though the yard was not legally required to comply with all of its neighbors’ requests, ignoring them would have ultimately come back to haunt it down the road, Cornell believes. “If you have a bad relationship with your neighbors, and they are complaining to the local municipality, it can create problems for your organization. There’s the possibility that, when you go for planning board approval or a building permit, the municipality can require fixes as part of the planning process even if there is no regulatory mandate for it,” he says. “They have a great deal of power and authority.”
Pre-empting problems
At times the scrapyard is the new kid on the block. To start out on the right foot, a yard should consider how to minimize potential neighborhood concerns before they have time to take hold.
When Atlas Metal & Iron moved from its downtown Denver site to an industrial area about a mile farther south, the new property had been a scrapyard previously, but it had not accepted peddler traffic. “We started having a lot of street people coming in,” Simms says, and not everyone respected the property. “It didn’t look too good, and we knew that it would worry our new neighbors.”
The company spelled out its expectations to its peddler customers. “We said, ‘Look, if you’re going to sell to us, you have to be good customers. If we find you littering, if we find you doing anything that is disruptive to other businesses, we won’t let you sell to us,’” Simms says. The company uses its sweepers and pickup trucks to go out at the end of the day and pick up errant materials, including buggies and pushcarts its customers have left behind. And it set up a mediation session with its neighbors and a city councilwoman to discuss the issue.
“She was very supportive that we buy scrap from the homeless and others and didn’t want to see that practice discontinued,” Simms says. “The neighbors began to understand that the city government thought that we were doing a good thing. When people are uncertain about things, it raises their concerns unduly. We’ve assuaged a lot of [their concerns].”
Atlas further built neighborhood goodwill by tearing down obsolete buildings on its property, offering neighbors secure parking spaces in its lot, and providing one other essential service: “This past winter, we had so much snow that the city couldn’t plow all of it,” Simms said. “So we used our large front-end loaders to plow city lots and streets.”
Scrapyard owners are resigned to the fact that people who support recycling in theory are often less supportive of the process when it’s right in front of them. “The old saying goes, ‘People love sausage, but they don’t want to see how it’s made,’” Denbo says. “People demand recycling, but they don’t want to see how it’s done.” •
Lindsay Holst is assistant editor of Scrap.