March/April 1998
By Lynn R. Novelli
Lynn R. Novelli is a writer based in Russell, Ohio.
Now more than ever, a woman’s place is turning out to be in the scrap recycling industry. Just ask these seven veterans, who discuss the challenges and opportunities of being scrap women.
Forget the old stereotype of the scrap industry being exclusively a male domain. That’s fast becoming as outdated as an upstroke baler.
Women are steadily gaining a firmer foothold and assuming a larger role in the industry as company presidents, managers, and traders. One perfect example is Shelley E. Padnos. Not only is she an officer in her family’s scrap recycling company, serving as executive vice president and chief administrative officer of Louis Padnos Iron & Metal Co. (Holland, Mich.), but she is also poised to become the first woman president of ReMA this March. (An interview with Padnos begins on page 55.)
She and many others like her—including the seven women profiled here—aren’t newcomers to the industry and they haven’t had their jobs handed to them. Many of them have worked in the industry 10 or even 20 years, and just like their male counterparts they have struggled and fought their way to the top.
To the industry’s credit, these women say that discrimination in terms of opportunities and salary has been rare. Where they do feel left out occasionally is on the social scene. And the major area of discrimination? The golf course.
Golf aside, these contemporary scrap women are highly motivated and success-oriented, and they say the scrap industry offers them opportunities to excel. For them, this opportunity is what keeps them coming to work every day.
Herewith, meet seven women who have helped make a woman’s place in the scrap business.
Nancy Fox
Nancy Fox’s career in the scrap industry began in 1981 when she joined Behr Precious Metals Inc. (Rockford, Ill.) as a telemarketer. At the time, selling metal by phone was a novel concept, she says.
In the beginning, Nancy, who had a business degree as well as experience in marketing and telemarketing, wondered whether she’d like the industry, but she soon found it “fun and interesting.”
Over the years, she progressed steadily with the company, becoming marketing manager, then vice president for sales and marketing, and—in 1997—president.
The path to the top wasn’t always smooth, but the difficulties weren’t related to being a woman in a man’s field, she says, noting, “when you start, you’re the new kid, whether you’re a man or a woman. How well you’ll do depends on how well you learn the business, and that definitely takes time.”
Currently, Nancy is the only female among the five presidents of the companies that make up Joseph Behr & Sons Inc., parent of Behr Precious Metals. “It’s been a challenge in a lot of ways because the others all have known each other a long time and have a sense of camaraderie,” she says.
Fox believes the scrap industry is a good career path for women and one in which professional positions are becoming more open to them. “Companies are realizing that women are as adept as men if they know the industry and are competent,” she says. “Scrap is an untapped industry where women can do very well.”
For Nancy, the scrap industry has certainly held her interest over the years, primarily because it’s constantly changing. “Product lines change, technology changes. It’s an industry that has allowed me to grow,” she explains.
For learning about the recycling business and keeping up-to-date on the newest technology, she finds professional industry organizations invaluable. A past president of the Central States Chapter of the International Precious Metals Institute, she now serves on the association’s board. She also attends various ReMA programs. “The conferences and activities these groups sponsor are very enlightening,” she offers. “They take time but are well worth it because they enhance my job.”
Cheryl Garrett
Being a female in the male-dominated scrap industry doesn’t phase Cheryl Garrett one bit. After more than 12 years with Columbus Scrap Corp. (Columbus, Ohio), she’s used to dealing mostly with men. Still, she occasionally runs across one who tries to take advantage of her gender. “There was a demolition contractor who brought us scrap,” she recounts. “I had to downgrade his material, and he thought he could intimidate me into changing my decision because he was bigger than me. I quickly rectified his thinking.”
Being female in the scrap industry can, in fact, be an advantage in some ways, Cheryl adds. “I think I can get in more doors than a man, and my customers are more willing to talk to me than to a man,” she says. “They see women as gentler, more honest, easier to talk to, less overbearing, and more creative.”
Cheryl began working for Columbus Scrap in 1985, joining the firm as a cashier to pay her college tuition. She hoped to be hired by a Big 8 accounting firm when she graduated. Instead, when Columbus Scrap offered her a job as bookkeeper, she took it and has been hooked ever since. “From then on, I never thought about leaving the business,” she says. “The way the business operates interested me—you sell metal before you buy it, you need creativity to offer something different from what other recyclers do, and you’re constantly searching for new mills, new customers.”
From bookkeeper, Cheryl progressed to computer manager, then assistant manager, and in 1992 to her current position of general manager, in which she’s responsible for all aspects of the operation. She reports to the company owners, all men, and has an all-male crew.
How does she manage in this decidedly male environment? In her view, she commands the respect of both superiors and subordinates by knowing the business and doing her job well, asserting, “that’s how you prove yourself.”
Based on her experience, Cheryl believes there are opportunities for women in the scrap industry. “But you need to be tough,” she notes. “You have to be persistent, willing to get dirty, and able to handle the challenges.”
Colleen Halpine
Colleen Halpine, environmental manager for American Iron & Supply Inc. (Minneapolis), is one of the few women in the scrap industry who got there by design, not chance. With a master’s degree in environmental health, she knew her career path would lead somewhere in recycling or waste management.
Her path to the scrap industry began in 1980 with a job in the Ramsey (Minn.) County solid waste program, where she “became interested in the environmental and public health aspects of waste management and recycling in the private sector.”
In 1990, she joined American Iron & Supply as recycling coordinator. In 1992, through a job expansion, she moved into her current position, in which she’s responsible for the firm’s environmental compliance, permitting, and government affairs.
To Colleen, working in a male-dominated industry has its advantages—“you get attention”—as well as its challenges, such as male-female interpersonal communication. “Men communicate differently than women,” she says. “I try to be aware of that in working with men to ensure there are no misunderstandings.”
The main challenge, she says, has less to do with being a woman in a man’s realm and more with the specialized, closely knit nature of the industry. “The scrap business is difficult for anyone to get into, male or female,” she says. “Historically, it’s a family-held industry where you can feel like an outsider if you’ve been in the business 15 years.”
To develop her knowledge of and connections in the recycling industry, Halpine has been active in professional organizations, including serving as a member of ISRI’s safety committee and president of the Minnesota Industrial Council on Environmental Management.
From her participation in these and other groups, Colleen has noted that the recycling industry each year attracts more women at the professional level. “But I don’t think that’s unique to this industry,” she says. “It tracks with other industries in which there are more women with advanced degrees who are moving into professional positions.”
Though the male-to-female ratio is still far from equal, it’s only a matter of time before women are fully integrated into the scrap industry, Colleen says, adding the caveat that “it’s probably going to take 20 years. Hopefully, in 2018 we’ll be laughing that we even did an article on women in the scrap industry.”
Alora Meisel
Many a successful career has been launched through fortuitous chance encounters. That’s certainly been the case for Alora Meisel, a trader with Criterion Recycling (Manalapan, N.J., and East Providence, R.I.). Alora entered the scrap business 17 years ago thanks to just such an encounter.
In 1980, she had recently left her job as booking manager/controller for the New Haven (Conn.) Coliseum when she met Michael Schiavone, a principal with Michael Schiavone & Sons Inc. (North Haven, Conn.), at a New Haven Chamber of Commerce meeting. “We got talking, and he offered me a job,” she remembers. “I told him I had to think about it. But I knew I was tired of crunching numbers and wanted to change careers.”
As it turned out, Alora accepted his offer and started with the company as an aluminum buyer—the only female trader in the company. “It was difficult being a newcomer in this industry, but it had nothing to do with gender,” she asserts. “Any person entering the industry with no scrap background has so much to learn. You get tested by the experience on a day-to-day basis. When you learn the business and can put the deals together, you earn the respect of your coworkers.”
Throughout her 12 years with Michael Schiavone & Sons, Alora continually expanded her knowledge and responsibilities by trading aluminum, copper, brass, stainless steel, and other nonferrous metals. The company’s position as a “major processor of ferrous and nonferrous metals,” she says, gave her a “great opportunity to learn all facets of the scrap recycling industry.”
In 1992, Alora’s husband was transferred to New Jersey, which prompted her to leave Michael Schiavone & Sons and begin looking for another job—in the scrap business, of course. As she says, “Once I was in the industry, I knew I wanted to stay.” She was soon hired as a trader for Criterion Recycling, buying insulated copper wire and cable lead, and selling brass scrap and copper chops.
Throughout her career in the scrap trade, Alora—a former board member of the Association of Women in the Metal Industry and president of ISRI’s New Jersey Chapter through April 1999—says she has always felt confident enough in her position to be herself, without worrying about male-female issues. “You’re not going to find me at Shelly’s Back Room cigar club during the ReMA meeting,” she says, “but there are plenty of men in the business who aren’t there either.”
Using her own career as an example, Alora maintains that the scrap industry is loaded with opportunities for women, though she concedes that it’s still a largely undiscovered career path for them. The majority of women in the industry, she notes, are family members or relatives of scrap company owners. “I don’t see that many non-family women in scrap firms as traders,” she says. Still, there are good opportunities for all women, though succeeding in the business “takes diligence in your efforts and you have to know what you’re doing,” she states.
Dana Schupan-Wardlaw
Dana Schupan-Wardlaw, marketing manager for Schupan & Sons Inc. (Kalamazoo, Mich.), joined the family business to help out in 1979 while pursuing a degree in sales and marketing. Her father, Nelson Schupan, who had entered the scrap business in 1968 by purchasing the Konigsberg Co., an existing Kalamazoo processing operation, died unexpectedly in 1974, leaving her older brothers Marc and Daniel to manage the business. When they found themselves needing help servicing customers, they called on Dana. “My sister wasn’t interested, and since I had retail sales and marketing experience, they thought I should be the one to help them,” she recalls.
Dana spent the next several years “doing PR stuff—knocking on customers’ doors to make sure things were going OK. Then at the end I would add, ‘And by the way, we sell aluminum,’” she says, referring to the company’s new aluminum sales business, which complements its ferrous and nonferrous scrap processing operations. “I knew nothing about the metals industry. I practically had to learn how to spell aluminum,” she jokes.
Dana left Schupan & Sons in 1981 to pursue her retail career through an internship in Chicago. The Schupan family ties are strong, however, and she was back in Kalamazoo by 1982, working full-time in the firm’s new aluminum sales division. In 1987, she moved over to the company’s industrial scrap division, where she is responsible for securing new accounts. She analyzes customers’ recycling needs, then sets up a customized program to service them and provide continuous monitoring of their operations.
“Sometimes I get in the door because the customer wants to see if I know what I’m talking about,” she says. “Then, when they see how the Schupan program increases their efficiency and ultimately earns them more money—and how we do what we promise—I earn their respect.”
In the almost 25 years since their father’s death, Dana and her brothers have built the company into a $100-million-a-year enterprise with three divisions and eight locations in Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan.
Though the Schupan & Sons name is well-known in the Midwest and though Dana has almost 20 years of experience under her belt, she still feels challenged every day. “For many customers, seeing a woman in the industrial recycling business is still a novelty. I know that a lot of times they’re wondering how a woman can know anything about scrap.”
Still, women have come a long way in the scrap industry in the past few decades. Dana recalls, for instance, attending her first ReMA commodity roundtable in 1980, when she was one of only a handful of women present. Today, “it’s great that more qualified women are coming into the business,” she says. “Scrap can be a great industry for women. If you love meeting new challenges every day and not having control but taking control, this is the job for you.”
Marsha Serlin
Marsha Serlin and her scrap company, United Scrap Metal Inc. (Cicero, Ill.)—which she founded and leads as president—have certainly received their share of positive publicity in the past two years. In 1996, the U.S. Small Business Administration selected Marsha as its National Small Business Subcontractor of the Year, making her the first woman to capture the award in its then-29-year history. Also in 1996, Arthur Andersen gave the company one of its Enterprise Awards for Best Business Practices in the area of customer satisfaction. And as if that weren’t enough, in December 1997 Serlin was named the Grant Thornton Executive Woman of the Year.
Until these awards brought her national media attention, Marsha maintained a low profile, quietly building a $40-million business from virtually nothing. She started United Scrap Metal in 1978 with $200 and a rented truck when she was abruptly faced with having to support her two young children. “The scrap business was something I could do without having to go back to school,” explains Marsha, who has a background in horticulture. “I didn’t need a lot of capital, and it looked simple.”
She started by buying used transmissions and selling them to a rebuilder. “At the time, the auto parts business was off-limits to women, and I got abused to no end,” she says. “I had men telling me to go home and cook dinner or take care of the kids.”
But Marsha persisted, learning more about the business every week and finally venturing into industrial scrap. “I found that if I showed intelligence and asked the right questions, I got the business,” she says. “I sold only to mills, and that strategy worked. United still has many of the same customers I started with.”
Marsha still likes to recall how her competitors in the Chicago market bet on how long her company would last. “Three months, six months, a year, they said. Then in 1996, when I received the National Small Business Subcontractor of the Year award, they finally realized I’m here to stay.”
For women in the scrap industry, she says, the biggest challenge “is to realize they can do it. There’s room for women to succeed in scrap, and it’s a great business, but you have to be tough.”
Marsha has seen the scrap business change considerably since she founded United Scrap Metal. “Scrap used to be a very unprofessional business,” she says. “Now it’s professionally managed. Everything is bottom-line results.” But she still enjoys the work. Her responsibilities are now centered on long-range planning, problem-solving, and trouble-shooting, all with an eye toward customer service. “Consistent customer service is still the heart of the business, and customer satisfaction is the driving force,” she says.
Ever the scrap entrepreneur, Marsha’s latest project is the installation of a chopping line to process the large volume of scrap wire her company purchases. Her long-range plans include possible expansion into a single-source strategy to accommodate customers that have multiple locations.
Mary Sue Smith
Mary Sue Smith, an owner of Far West Fibers Inc. (Portland, Ore.) and Spokane Recycling Products (Spokane, Wash.), remembers when scrap paper was known exclusively by the politically incorrect term “waste” paper. “There was no prestige to the business at all,” she says, noting that men and women in general weren’t interested in careers in the field.
Mary Sue, however, was interested. She started her career in the paper industry with Boise Cascade Corp. in 1975, doing invoicing and keeping track of trades. By 1984, she was buying double-lined kraft for two of the company’s mills and selling it for the papermaker’s more than two dozen box plants.
In 1987, faced with moving to Idaho with Boise Cascade or changing jobs, Mary Sue opted to stay in Portland, joining Far West Fibers as assistant brokerage manager, with responsibility for buying and selling all grades of scrap paper. “As the company grew and evolved, I progressed with it,” she says. In 1988, she bought her first shares in the firm and in 1994 was named general manager of the company’s E-Z Recycling subsidiary.
Today, Mary Sue—immediate past-president of the Oregon Newsprint Recycling Task Force and a member of the paper division of the Oregon Recycling Development Council—isn’t the only woman in a management position in the Far West Fibers ranks. The company also has a female brokerage manager and a female warehouse staffing manager. On the plant floor, however, “it’s still mostly men due to the mechanical nature of the job and the industry’s overall attitude,” she says.
In her career, salary has been the biggest gender-related challenge through the years. “I came up through the clerical ranks and that made a difference at times in what I was paid,” she says.
She was willing to stick with the business, however, because she found recycling exciting and important. “It’s not an easy business to succeed in,” she says. “You have to work hard, be willing to take an entry-level position, and maybe do work you think is beneath you.”
That’s her advice, in fact, to anyone starting in the scrap business—male or female—though she notes that young people aren’t always amenable to starting at the bottom and working their way up. Far West Fibers, for instance, places its management trainees in clerical positions and requires a one-year training program that includes six months in the warehouse. The reactions of job candidates to this training program are “interesting,” Mary Sue says. “I see more shock from the young men than the young women. Men seem to have the attitude that they should start at the top for $50,000. It doesn’t work that way for anyone—male or female.”
In general, Mary Sue says she’d like to see more women entering the recycling industry, but change is slow in coming. “It is coming, though,” she asserts, “and what the men don’t realize is that we are a force to be reckoned with.” •
Now more than ever, a woman’s place is turning out to be in the scrap recycling industry. Just ask these seven veterans, who discuss the challenges and opportunities of being scrap women.