March/April 2001
When M. Burstein & Co. Inc. relocated, it not only brought its activities indoors but also placed them atop an environmental containment system that its principals call “the future of the scrap industry.”
By Robert L. Reid
Robert L. Reid is managing editor of Scrap.
A family-owned nonferrous scrap company with only one location and 16 employees might seem like an unlikely place to find leading-edge environmental protection systems. But a visit to M. Burstein & Co. Inc.’s new, entirely indoor scrap processing plant in Holbrook, Mass., proves that you don’t need to be a big operator to make a big move in the “green” direction.
M. Burstein made this big move quite literally by making a move—from the outmoded factory that had been its home for more than 40 years to a renovated modern building with 65,000 square feet under roof, plus a newly installed environmental containment system that represents “the future of the scrap industry,” predicts Michael Gold, general manager (for details, see “A Green Foundation” on page 86).
In the meantime—before such containment systems become commonplace—M. Burstein hopes to reap another kind of green reward from its environmental efforts: competitive advantage. The company intends to use its containment system to attract qualified customers who are looking to eliminate any downstream liability involving waste fluids.
Guided by Experience and Necessity
If necessity is the mother of invention, then experience is easily the father, at least in M. Burstein’s case. For it was the experience of spending year after year in its previous facility—a one-time railroad wheel factory—that convinced the company’s managers to seek a new, totally indoor location.
The old facility—located in Chelsea, Mass.—was “pretty well used,” explains Jerry Burstein, president. Outside, material and equipment were spread around the 14-acre site. Shearing activities were at the mercy of the New England weather. The firm’s offices were separated from the warehouse by a bridge over railroad tracks. The warehouse roof had so many holes that it was often colder inside than out in the yard. The flow of material was severely hampered by the building’s constraints. Barrels and Gaylord boxes of brass, copper, stainless steel, and aluminum were sometimes stacked so high and deep that they blocked easy access by forklifts. Scales did double duty for receiving and shipping, sometimes being used for storage when there was nowhere else to put material at night. There were even small trees growing inside the building.
Along with such experiences, M. Burstein’s managers recognized the growing need for scrap recyclers to run more environmentally sound operations. But it didn’t make sense, they felt, to invest in new environmental systems for such an old facility. Instead, the company began looking at new sites, knowing that it would only consider those that could house the entire operation under one roof.
After three years of looking at industrial properties in the greater Boston area, M. Burstein bought the Holbrook building, which was essentially a huge open structure. The warehouse measured 320 feet long by 210 feet wide, interrupted only by slender steel columns that rose 24 feet from the freshly painted concrete floor to the high ceiling above. Plus, the warehouse and offices were part of the same building. In short, says Jerry Burstein, the site was “perfect for us.”
M. Burstein found a buyer for its Chelsea facility, but the contract stipulated that it had to vacate the site by Labor Day 2000. Good planning enabled the firm to meet that deadline without “missing a beat of business during the move,” Jerry notes with pride. “Every pickup was picked up, everything that had to be shipped was shipped out.”
Hands-on Management
While it’s never easy to move a scrap recycling operation, M. Burstein is one company with a lot of experience in that area. The Holbrook site, in fact, represents the firm’s fourth home in its history.
Founded in 1932 by Jerry Burstein’s uncle Morris (the “M” of M. Burstein), the company started as a small-scale nonferrous operation in Chelsea, just north of Boston, which was then the heart of the region’s scrap industry.
Morris, the eldest of five brothers, had to quit high school to launch the new company because his father, a rag merchant, had just died and someone needed to support the Burstein family. Over the years, Morris’s brothers—Hy (Jerry’s father), Barney, Arthur, and Mac—joined the firm, some working in the plant while earning degrees from nearby Northeastern or Tufts universities. Three of the brothers interrupted their scrap careers to serve in World War II. The company relocated twice in its first three decades, albeit always within Chelsea.
In the same period, Mac Burstein also branched out to form a sister company, Admiral Metals Service Center in Woburn, Mass. Admiral, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, has since become a leading metal service center on the East Coast and remains a key factor in M. Burstein’s success. The two firms are connected by mutual business dealings and are united under a holding company headed by Mac Burstein, the only surviving brother of the original five.
Jerry Burstein, whose father previously served as president of the scrap business, joined the company in 1962, hand-sorting metal for $1.25 an hour. Eventually, he rose to assistant plant manager then ran operations for 25 years before succeeding his uncle Mac as president about a year ago. Though he now runs the company, Jerry has never forgotten his hands-on connection to the metal and how it gets processed. “I’ve basically handled every piece of equipment in the company at one time or another,” he explains.
Indeed, M. Burstein’s top three managers—Jerry, Michael Gold, and Arni Butter, who’s in charge of operations—have more than 100 years of such hands-on experience among them. “We know the materials that we handle,” Jerry stresses.
What’s more, some of the firm’s managers also have experience operating the equipment used by their consumers, such as rotary or reverberatory furnaces. “We have the knowledge here in the scrap operation of what our consumers want,” explains Arni Butter, who previously ran a local brass and bronze ingotmaking operation. “We know the type of scrap they want and how they want it prepared. As a result, our rejection rate is virtually nonexistent.”
An Industrious Product Mix
The type of scrap M. Burstein offers its consumers includes brass mill and copper refinery material—its leading products by volume—ranging from brass chips to lower-grade copper-clad metals. Closely following the red metals are stainless steel and nickel alloys, then aluminum. Certain specialty metals plus zinc, tin, and precious metals round out the company’s nonferrous mix.
M. Burstein handles some ferrous as an accommodation to its nonferrous suppliers, processing the material indoors without a crane.
Notably, the company’s feedstock is almost entirely industrial, with some coming from other processors. M. Burstein accepts nothing from peddlers or other over-the-scale sources. The firm draws its material from all of New England, with a number of suppliers south of Boston—another factor in moving the roughly 20 miles south from Chelsea to Holbrook. Suppliers range from Fortune 500 companies and OEM manufacturers to metal-stamping and screw-machine operations. Many of these suppliers have been customers for several generations.
Sometimes the material arrives clean and needs little processing. Other times the same grade of metal from a different supplier—say, 70/30 brass—will arrive with steel punchings interspersed in the brass. Then the material must pass over M. Burstein’s Hustler vibrating table and magnetic separator. Likewise, “fluffy” strips of metal must be briquetted and turnings must be drained of oil. Depending on a particular customer’s preferences, the same type of metal might be packaged different ways.
Over the years, many of New England’s traditional manufacturers have been replaced by high-tech and semiconductor businesses. M. Burstein has “adapted to this change in product mix by developing new markets and stretching further out geographically,” says Gold.
The company sells its scrap mainly to brass sheet and rod mills, stainless producers, copper refineries, and primary and secondary aluminum smelters in major industrial cities such as Pittsburgh and Cleveland, throughout New York state and Michigan, as well as states as far south as Kentucky.
Export represents only a small portion of M. Burstein’s business—down considerably since the dollar strengthened, Asian markets weakened, and an influx of material from Eastern Europe hit the markets. But Canadian consumers still buy regularly. And when export markets are good, the company’s Boston location (roughly 200 miles further east than other major ports such as New York and Philadelphia) gives it a competitive advantage since M. Burstein’s containers take one day less to reach Europe.
Nearly everything the company ships leaves on common carrier trucks. Rail used to dominate M. Burstein’s shipments, though. Back in Chelsea, the company once had access to two rail lines simultaneously and shipped some 175 railcars a year. But trucking deregulation and the rail industry’s troubled service record made the company switch its transportation mode, though many of the truck trailers do end up riding piggyback on railroad flatcars for some part of their journey.
One key aspect to M. Burstein’s experience with both suppliers and consumers involves the fact that it handles the scrap generated by companies that buy metal from its sister firm, Admiral Metals. “This unique association enables our firms to develop a total relationship with our customers,” says Gold. “In addition, many of our consumers are Admiral’s suppliers. It’s been a very beneficial corporate program since it marries us to the customer in the front door for Admiral’s products and out the back door for the scrap.”
Small Work Force, Big Ideas
Only 16 employees work at M. Burstein’s new facility in a small Holbrook industrial park. These include the three top managers, two office employees, one buyer, one maintenance person, six hourly workers in the plant, and three truck drivers. Such smallness—and the close proximity of office and warehouse—creates a special environment in which managers and employees “truly recognize that we’re all in this together,” says Gold.
Describing M. Burstein’s work force as “second to none,” Gold notes that “many of our most innovative and productive ideas have come from our employees.”
Moreover, longevity is one of the company’s hallmarks. The average employee has served nearly 15 years, and one recently retired after more than 50.
Moreover, the unionized hourly workers (part of Teamsters Local 25) are highly trained and highly skilled. A cross-training program—modeled on former New York Yankees manager Casey Stengel’s “platoon” system of baseball—ensures that every employee has varied skills and can operate any piece of machinery or perform any task. This applies to managers as well as hourly workers.
“We’ve all been under trucks with Bunsen burners at 4:30 in the morning in February, trying to thaw out frozen brake lines,” Gold notes.
And while frozen brakes will hopefully become a thing of the past—after all, the new warehouse has plenty of room to bring trucks inside on cold winter nights—Gold stresses that no employee is ever asked “to do anything that the managers haven’t also done at times.”
M. Burstein offers a generous benefits package that includes paid vacation, health insurance, life insurance, a 401(k) with company match, and even holiday turkeys. Labor-management relations at M. Burstein are “very positive,” Gold says, and recently resulted in a new five-year contract. The union steward is Pedro Flores, who began in the warehouse and is now the company’s lead truck driver.
The company also offers a special bonus based on attendance. An employee who finishes the year without any absent “occurrences” receives this bonus at year’s end. An occurrence is defined as an absence of any length. Thus, missing one day and missing a number of consecutive days each counts as a single occurrence.
“We have eliminated one-day absenteeism,” notes Arni Butter.
Employees with six such occurrences in a given contract year receive a one-week suspension. Those with seven are terminated. But the policy also lets employees erase occurrences, with one occurrence being eliminated for each calendar month of perfect attendance. In 10 years, Butter notes, only one employee has ended the year with unerased occurrences and thus failed to get his bonus, and even that employee only failed that one time.
Perhaps most remarkably, M. Burstein is maintaining its attendance record though many of its employees—some of whom used to live within walking distance of the Chelsea plant—now have considerably longer commutes.
To make the trip a little smoother, though, the company pays the cost of gasoline for car-pooling employees.
M. Burstein also boasts a strong safety record and extensive safety training, with every employee learning CPR and related “first response” methods, Gold stresses.
Moreover, a rigorous pre-employment physical is designed to help reduce workers’ comp incidents by introducing employees to the physical demands of the job before they start on the job.
Moving to the new facility also allowed the company to introduce—ahead of OSHA’s new standard—some elementary aspects of ergonomics to the workplace, such as altering the height of certain equipment to reduce back strain, Gold notes.
Building on a Worldwide Reputation
So what’s next for M. Burstein, now that it has a new home and an advanced containment system? Perhaps the Internet. A Web page is likely in the company’s future, and Jerry Burstein considers B2B e-commerce “the wave of the future.”
Even without instantaneous global communication networks, though, this small company with big ideas has clearly made its mark both at home and abroad.
As Michael Gold states, “We have a reputation for service and performance that’s the envy of our competition”—and a commitment to quality that people notice.
Offering one example, Jerry notes that back when export markets were better, a broker from New Jersey was conducting business in India when he noticed a particular load of brass scrap at a consumer’s facility. The broker liked the quality packaging so much that he traced the load back to M. Burstein.
“He’s been buying from us ever since,” Jerry says.
A Green Foundation
When M. Burstein moved into its new plant in Holbrook, Mass., last September, the facility needed modifications to become an efficient scrap operation. The company replaced the existing loading dock doors, added truck ramps, installed an outside truck scale, and reworked the inside electricity. But the most extensive remodeling began when the company dug a hole—100 feet long by 30 feet wide by 4 feet deep—in the middle of the concrete floor.
That hole was the first step in M. Burstein’s total environmental containment (TEC) system, designed by Envirogen Inc. (Princeton, N.J.) to collect the residual fluids from turnings and other oily scrap.
Now, it might seem strange to launch a new environmental system by breaking through a concrete floor—after all, many scrap plants consider concrete to be part of the solution to preventing fluid contamination. The fact is, though, that “all concrete cracks and it’s porous—water and oil flow through concrete,” explains Richard Schowengerdt, a principal environmental engineer with Envirogen’s Milwaukee office who has helped oversee the M. Burstein project.
So Envirogen helped M. Burstein install a system “to collect the fluid once the concrete did crack, so that when a drop of oil hits the ground it ends up in an engineered collection system where it can’t get into the environment, then gets routed to a facility where it’s stored until it can be taken offsite,” Schowengerdt says.
At the bottom of that giant hole in the concrete is a layer of compacted clay, just like in a landfill, Schowengerdt notes. Then, there’s a geosynthetic double-liner of HDPE plastic, with a net, pipes, sand, and gravel atop the plastic. Covering it all is a 12-inch-thick concrete pad, reinforced by rebar and sloped toward a collection trough. Oily scrap can then be dumped either in an open section of the pad or within the concrete walls of three large bins, each designated for a specific material.
Fluid that falls on the concrete pad drains toward the trough, while fluid that makes it through the pad is collected by the pipes. Ultimately, all fluids are pumped into a 5,000-gallon tank from which they can easily be removed by a licensed waste oil recycling company. There’s even room for the oil collector to pull his truck inside the building.
In addition to the main pad, M. Burstein installed a smaller two-bin version of the same system back by its large baler so that oily material could be drained before processing. Another pad sits near the office end of the warehouse—nicknamed “Pancho’s pad” for the company’s lead man, Pancho Ramos, who hand-sorts miscellaneous material in that area. Plus, equipment such as the D&J briquetter and Hustler sorting table sit atop raised concrete pads with a collection groove running around the perimeter. Fluids from these additional pads are collected with shop vacs and added to the storage tank when necessary.
Modifications to the Holbrook building added “significantly” to the site’s purchase price, with the environmental system making up the bulk of that expense, Jerry Burstein says. Eventually, the company might add an oil-water separation system as well.
But don’t think M. Burstein is flaunting the frugal image of New Englanders. All these investments, together with a planned indemnification program (details of which are still being developed), are expected to attract new customers—and perhaps even command a premium for the resulting clean scrap.•
When M. Burstein & Co. Inc. relocated, it not only brought its activities indoors but also placed them atop an environmental containment system that its principals call “the future of the scrap industry.”