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Everything and the kitchen sink … literally … can be found at Recla Metals in Montrose, Colorado. BARTON GLASSER -
Owner-operators Garry and Diann Fulks say that with metals prices soaring, business is better than ever. BARTON GLASSER -
Recycled steel ready for resale. BARTON GLASSER -
Larry Grater (third from top) uses a blow torch. BARTON GLASSER PHOTOS
MONTROSE, COLORADO
A long the banks of the
Uncompahgre River in western Colorado sits an old red Volkswagen
squareback. Its windows have been shot out, but the body isn’t too
beat up, and the old stereo’s still in the dash. It looks like it
could be a sweet ride with a little work.
Garry Fulks
doesn’t see it that way, though. To him, this classic automobile is
nothing more than a hunk of steel, a bit of copper, some aluminum
and a bunch of “fluff” — the non-metallic pieces of the car. Like
the hundreds of tons of old washing machines, pipes and other
objects piled nearby, this car is going nowhere but the crusher.
Then it will be trucked off to the shredder to be ground up like
corn meal. It probably weighs about a ton and a half. Approximate
value: $150. “I don’t get sentimental about these things,” says
Fulks.
For 35 years, Garry and his
wife, Diann, have owned and operated Recla Metals, one of the
biggest purveyors of scrap metal in this part of the state. To
them, the world is either metal or fluff, with the good stuff
either ferrous ‘ it sticks to a magnet, like steel — or
non-ferrous, like copper or aluminum. And no matter how beat-up,
rusted or old it is, the metal can all be chopped up, melted down
and reused.
Business is booming for the Fulks. In fact,
scrap has become a billion-dollar industry, driven in part by the
same high metal prices that have nudged the West’s dormant mines
from their slumber. The mining boom is likely to leave the region
even more messed up than before. The scrap boom, on the other hand,
will help clean it up a bit, as backyard junk heaps are exchanged
for cash.
“This is an extraordinarily green business,”
Diann says. “And it has been since before it was vogue to be
green.”
The scrap yard’s 90-ton
machinery dwarfs mere cardboard-gathering, can-collecting mortals.
Recla and its 22 employees classify, “densify,” bale and ship —
that is to say, recycle — some 10,000 tons of metal each year.
Nationally, over 1 million tons of copper is scrapped and recycled
each year — more than is scraped out of the earth by miners —
along with 200 million automobiles and 800,000 tons of aluminum
cans.
On this chilly March day, a bundled-up employee
dumps bag after bag of beer and soda cans into a big contraption
that gobbles them up, then spits out colorful, shiny “biscuits”
that are consolidated into 2,500-pound bales. “Those cans,” says
Garry, “are gonna go right back into the can business.”
Each bale that goes back into the system allows more than four tons
of bauxite (aluminum ore) to be left in the earth. Recycling
aluminum also uses about 90 percent less energy than creating cans
from virgin aluminum. (In spite of all of this, only about 52
percent of aluminum cans are recycled in the U.S. today, compared
to 68 percent in 1992.)
Each shiny
bale will net Recla about $2,500 on today’s scrap market. That’s
about three times what the same cans would have been worth a few
years ago, mostly because of high demand: China and India need more
metal to support their whirlwind growth. Fulks points to a huge
pile of rusted steel, one side of which seems to be bleeding dozens
of horseshoes, and says the whole thing is bound for the Pacific
Rim.
The boom comes at a price, though, namely theft: In
recent years, construction sites, railroad crossings and air
conditioners have been raided by burglars for the copper inside.
Thieves even Sawzall cars’ catalytic converters to get at the iota
of platinum hidden inside. Recla hasn’t been immune. This winter,
high-dollar goods such as copper wire had a tendency to disappear
at night, which is why there’s now razor wire around the whole yard
and an extra enclosure around the copper. Recla ships it off as
quickly as it can, by sealed truck, not railroad car.
“When the price is as expensive as it is,
it’s not good to keep an inventory on hand,” says Garry.
It’s not just metal prices that cause the flow of metal to
fluctuate. Western Colorado’s rapid growth means more people
disposing of more stuff. And as real estate values shoot up, so
does the volume of scrap: When an old farm sells for big bucks, the
new owners are prone to demolish the decrepit house (with its
copper pipe and wire and aluminum siding) to make room for a fancy
mountain mansion. And newcomers tend to prefer snazzy landscaping
to all those broken-down cars and farm implements that have been
melting into the earth for decades.
But it also increases the pressure on the business. As the town
gentrifies, the riverfront land where industrial uses were once
commonly located gains a different value. There’s now a bike path
running along the river, just across from the yard. And the people
who frequent the path don’t always appreciate the subtle aesthetics
of a 180,000-pound shear clipping apart a transmission like a
toenail.
“There’s people who know we serve a purpose,”
says Fulks. “Then there’s some who want us gone. They just don’t
give a rat’s ass.”
The author is
HCN‘s editor. See a video of Recla Metals at
hcn.org.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Uber Recycling.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
