The Great Scrap Search

November/December 1992

Scrap—and opportunity—is where you find it. Here's a look at some companies that have found new or interesting sources for a variety of recyclable materials.

BY KENT KISER

Kent Kiser is associate editor of Scrap Processing and Recycling.

When Andy Rapkin, a trader with Wise Metals Co. Inc. (Linthicum, Md.), received a call from the Maryland House of Corrections, he was worried. Were some of his past sins coming back to haunt him? he wondered. Had the authorities issued an all-points bulletin he should know about?

Fortunately, the truth was not so dramatic. Prison officials needed to find a scrap company that could handle aluminum license plate scrap from the Maryland State Prison in Jessup, and they called Wise Metals. Now, more than a year later, the firm continues to service the prison, picking up material approximately once a month.

There are cons (pardon the pun) to picking up scrap from a prison, most related to security concerns, Rapkin notes. Just to enter the prison, for instance, Wise Metals's truck drivers must pass through several different gates and present plenty of proper identification and paperwork, outlining their business and contact. Before the driver can leave, the scrap—which is usually collected in gaylord containers—must be dumped out in front of prison officials to make sure there are no prisoners hiding inside. If no potential escapees are found, the scrap is reloaded into gaylords or drums and hauled off the prison grounds. Considering that Wise Metals gets a "small amount" of scrap through the prison, it seems like a lot of work for little return, but Rapkin says, "It's not too bad." After all, it's good aluminum scrap from a sure source.

Castle Metal Co. ( Boston ) has had similar trying, but worthwhile, experiences in its work with several facilities in the Massachusetts Correctional Institution system. In addition to handling license plate scrap from the prison in Walpole, Castle accepts miscellaneous scrap from three other state facilities, including old machinery, cut-offs from steel sheets, pipe, and "all the steel knives they find on the prisoners," laughs Andy Fruman, Castle's vice president. "We take the good with the bad."

The firm picks up the material—"a good amount of scrap," Fruman says—every two or three months and has to jump through its own share of security hoops. "It takes a lot of time when we pick material up," he asserts. Not only do prison guards search under the hood and chassis of Castle's trucks, but they, too, poke around in the scrap in search of prisoners. "It's like you see in the movies," Fruman says.

Adding to Castle's labors, the firm is obligated to cut all the scrap license plates in half before selling the material to prevent unregistered plates from being stolen and used. Despite these obstacles—"It's a hard job," Fruman concedes—Castle has served the prisons for 10 years and plans to continue doing so.

Prisons are just one of a handful of new, alternative, nontraditional, untapped, or just downright interesting sources of material that scrap companies have discovered. And as some traditional scrap suppliers decrease their scrap generation, while household and office collection programs alter the face of recycling, finding new scrap sources becomes more and more important. In essence, developing new scrap suppliers is simply good business. And as the following anecdotes show, scrap firms around the country have left few scrap sources unexplored, tapping into schools, hotels, amusement parks, and other scrap generators—with positive results.

Scrapping the Flamingo

When you gaze down the main streets of Las Vegas , all you see is hotel after hotel after hotel. While some might consider it an eyesore, to Jeanette Friedman, secretary and treasurer of Silver Dollar Recycling (North Las Vegas), it's a beautiful sight. "Hotels are always renovating," she notes, and that means a lot of scrap. Indeed, over the years, Silver Dollar has received literally tons of scrap from the likes of Caesars  Palace , the Aladdin, the Flamingo Hilton, Bally's, Excalibur, the Las Vegas Hilton, and others. "We've hit most of the hotels here one way or another in the last 10 years," says Marty Johnson, Silver Dollar's vice president.

Most of the hotel scrap comes from maintenance or remodeling projects. "There are always things needing to be replaced in a hotel"—new locks, appliances, faucets, boiler equipment, lighting systems, window frames, even old one-arm bandit slot machines, Johnson says. These scrap items come in a spectrum of metals from aluminum to steel to brass. The firm secures the scrap through each hotel's engineering department and its subcontractors, collecting material using small pickup boxes or large roll-offs, depending on the expected volume.

Silver Dollar also recycles the token coins from hotel casinos. Thus far in 1992, the firm has recycled more than 11,000 pounds of such coins, which are usually made of brass, nickel-coated brass, or—in cases of counterfeit tokens—lead. The company used to recycle much more—29,000 pounds in 1990, for instance—but it has been facing stiffer competition for the material in recent years from coin-minting companies, Friedman says.

Back to School

In 1988, Robert Mendelson, president of Donco Paper Supply Co. (Chicago), saw a market demand for high-quality postconsumer fiber—the kind of fiber found in polycoated milk and frozen food cartons. At the time, Donco and its two Cincinnati-based affiliate companies, Ohio Pulp Mills Inc. and Poly Recyclers Inc., already specialized in recycling postindustrial polycoated carton scrap. "So moving into the postconsumer sectors of the market seemed to make a tremendous amount of sense," says David Mendelson, Donco sales representative.

But where could the firms find supplies of postconsumer milk cartons?

Local elementary schools, of course. So in 1989, Ohio Pulp Mills and Poly Recyclers began working with grade schools in the Cincinnati area, encouraging students to separate their cartons from their lunch waste. "We want to make the milk carton as recyclable as the soda can," David Mendelson asserts. "Our ultimate goal is to complete the loop—that is, take products from the schools and recycle them into products that go back into the schools, such as recycling milk cartons into school books."

The main challenge of the project was not persuading schools and students to participate, but rather arranging to collect, transport, process, and market the material. An average grade school generates approximately 1,000 milk cartons a day, David Mendelson notes. Due to the potential spoilage of the material, Poly Recyclers must pick up cartons from each school every other day and immediately wash, shred, and bale the cartons. Even then, the material has only about a two-week shelf life before it must be repulped, he says.

Despite these challenges, the two companies have managed to make the recycling program a success. At the moment, Ohio Pulp Mills can manufacture up to 200 tons a month of 100-percent recycled high-quality pulp, containing 50-percent postconsumer and 50-percent postindustrial fiber. The pulp is then sold to paper mills for use in tissue products, greeting card stock, and writing paper.

As for expansion, the companies have identified "enough postconsumer raw material to fiber up to six mills around the country, each using 50 tons a day of postconsumer fiber," David Mendelson says. In September, in fact, the firms began expanding the program into New York . And there is plenty of room for growth. Of the estimated 500,000 tons of polycoated milk carton stock used in the United States per year, 175,000 tons could potentially be recovered, he reports. Besides schools, he notes, milk carton scrap could also be drawn from nursing homes, curbside collection programs, hospitals, and other food-service sources. To maximize recovery, "we need the support of the public to buy paper products made from postconsumer milk cartons," says Robert Mendelson. "That will stimulate demand and subsequent collection of the material."

Summa Cum Scrap

In the name of higher education, U.S. colleges and universities generate a lot of scrap—mostly paper. "We're talking huge volumes," says Sue Szafranski, senior buyer for Pioneer Paper Stock (Minneapolis), which has recovered paper from the local campus of the University of Minnesota for approximately seven years. The company receives high-quality paper such as white sulfite and colored manifold through contracts with the university's print shop, central duplicating facility, and other paper generators. In the last three years, Pioneer has also been accepting paper from the university's recycling-collection program, which encompasses materials such as postconsumer colored ledger paper, course offering books with glued backings, phone books, coated papers such as magazines, and other grades.

City Carton Co. Inc. (Iowa City, Iowa) also knows a thing or two about recycling paper from colleges, maintaining a 20-year relationship with its local university, the University of Iowa. For 19 of those years, City Carton handled only paper from the school, dealing directly with its computer center, bookkeeping office, print shop—"wherever paper was generated," says John Ockenfels, the firm's president and chief executive officer.

Two years ago, however, the university implemented a campus-wide program that now collects paper, glass containers, all-aluminum used beverage cans (UBCs), steel cans, and high-density polyethylene and polyethylene terephthalate containers, using 37 16-cubic-yard roll-offs around the campus. In 1991, City Carton won a bid to receive these materials and has been working since then to help make the program viable. The biggest challenges have been handling the variety and volume of materials, which represent a 90-percent increase from what the firm had been receiving from the school. Another main challenge has been educating program participants to ensure pure loads, Ockenfels asserts.

Universities are also ideal sources for all types of metal scrap, as many recyclers have learned. American Iron & Supply Co. (Minneapolis), for instance, handles all the metal scrap from the University of Minnesota 's nearby campus. Ben Heifitz Inc. (Madison, Wis.) serves local campuses of the University of Wisconsin , and Fell Iron & Metal Inc. (Bloomington, Ind.) buys metals cans and a variety of scrap from its hometown school, Indiana University.

Mickey Mouse Recycling

When most people think of Walt Disney World, they probably think of Mickey Mouse, Cinderella's Castle, or the Space  Mountain roller coaster. But when Aaron Scrap Metals Inc. (Orlando, Fla.) thinks of Disney World, it thinks of scrap. For more than six years, the firm has handled the theme park's scrap, which consists of a variety of unsegregated metals from the park's maintenance division. "Disney World is just like a little city," says Chuck Grossman, Aaron Scrap's manager, "so whatever scrap you'd find in a city, you find there." While Disney World might seem like an exotic scrap source, Grossman emphasizes that the park's scrap is not unusual—except in rare instances, such as when the lime-green hood of Herbie the Love Bug came through the scrap stream.

Steiner-Liff Iron and Metal Co. (Nashville, Tenn.) has a similar relationship with Opryland USA, a theme park located in Nashville . In addition to selling UBCs to Steiner-Liff, the theme park delivers a variety of scrap to the recycler from its kitchen, maintenance, and transportation operations.

Homeward Bound

Until the advent of curbside collection programs, most households in the United States represented an untapped vein of recyclable materials, including paper, UBCs, steel cans, and plastic and glass containers. Today, this cache of material is becoming increasingly mined by municipalities and waste haulers, but also scrap recyclers.

Commercial Metals Co. (Dallas), for instance, founded in late 1990 a separate residential recycling division named CMC Recycling, which currently operates curbside collection programs in Highland Park and University Park, two Dallas suburbs. CMC Recycling also runs its own material recovery facility (MRF) to process the recyclables collected in its programs.

The Park programs accept all residential recyclables and have achieved a 25 percent participation rate. In any given week, 75 percent of the participants (households must "subscribe" to the program)  set material out for collection, boasts Wes Constable, director of CMC Recycling. "Overall we're very satisfied with the feedback we've gotten from the public and the local officials." He points out that "sometimes the public can be very demanding, but we must take that in stride and handle it."

Midwest Iron & Metal Co. Inc. (Hutchinson, Kan.) has also seen opportunities in household recycling. This summer, the company started up a 2,000-square-foot, 10-employee MRF to handle materials from a citywide curbside collection program. At the MRF, steel cans are shredded, glass bottles are sorted and crushed, UBCs are briquetted, and paper and plastic containers are sorted and baled. By the end of the year, the MRF will be processing material from approximately 14,000 households, says Russell Fallis Jr., Midwest 's vice president of operations.

In the program, two local waste haulers deliver bagged recyclables to Midwest's MRF. "We don't want to become haulers," Fallis says. "We want to do the thing we're set up to do, which is recycle." The firm's foray into household recycling has certainly been a learning experience. "Processing the material is relatively easy," Fallis notes, "but the labor it takes is quite consuming. Another problem is that markets open and close quickly, but that happens in all scrap markets." Despite the bumps, Midwest plans to make household recycling a permanent part of its scrap operations.

Exploring the Possibilities

A cursory glance at other nontraditional, nonindustrial scrap generators illustrates just how many possibilities exist for "sourcing" new material.

• National and state parks. As tourist hotspots, U.S. parks are receptacles of a large volume of recyclable materials. Dow Chemical Co. (Midland, Mich.) has launched recycling-collection programs in six of the major national park—Yosemite, Mount Rainier, Great Smoky Mountains, Acadia, Grand Canyon, and Everglades—as well as on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and at a state park in Dade County, Fla. The Dow programs accept commingled glass, plastics, and metal containers along with some scrap metals, all of which are currently sold to waste-hauling companies. Opportunities exist, however, for scrap recycling firms to participate, Dow says, particularly in the latter four national parks, not to mention the myriad untapped state parks.
  
• Hospitals. Hospitals generate a vast array of recyclable materials from their administrative, food service, and medical activities, including office paper, corrugated, steel cans, UBCs, glass containers, plastic bottles, and more exotic scrap items such as spent X-ray film. City Carton can vouch for the benefits of working with hospitals—it has collected office paper and corrugated from the University of Iowa Hospital for the past decade.
  
• Airlines. A few airlines, notably USAir and American, encourage their flight attendants on select routes to collect aluminum cans and some plastic cups and trays for recycling. The material collected in these in-flight programs is usually removed by the airline's food-service caterer, which then sells the material to recycling firms.
  
• Restaurants. Restaurants, bars, cafeterias, food courts, and other eating and drinking establishments can be chock full of corrugated, steel cans, glass containers, and UBCs. All American Recycling (Ocala, Fla.) knows this, so it recently expanded its operations to collect those materials from area restaurants. The firm processes the recyclables at its 15,000-square-foot MRF, which features two sorting lines and a crew of six.
  
• Shopping centers. All American Recycling also services a handful of local strip shopping malls, collecting a variety of materials with an emphasis on corrugated. On a grander scale, Browning-Ferris Industries (Houston) has built one of its Recyclery MRFs under the gargantuan Mall of America in Minneapolis. The operation, which came on-line this fall, recovers corrugated, plastic containers, UBCs, and other materials using two sorting lines and a baler.
  
• Military bases. While military bases may be obvious sources of metal scrap to many recyclers, All American Recycling has found Cecil Field Naval Air Station (Jacksonville, Fla.) to be an equally rich source of UBCs, corrugated, and an array of other postconsumer recyclables. The firm is also planning to work with another Jacksonvilleinstallation, the Mayport Naval Air Station.
  
• Golf courses. Silver Dollar Recycling receives scrap from local Las Vegas golf courses, mainly in the form of metal sprinkler systems, lawn-mowing equipment, copper tubing, and batteries from golf carts.
  

While these companies provide a glimpse into the creative ways recyclers are finding scrap, their examples are by no means comprehensive. The list of possible scrap sources is truly endless. The fun—and the opportunity—lies in finding them. •