A Visit to Metal Recyling

To begin, I bill myself as 'a part time personal assistant for busy people' as the 30 second description of what you do to get people interested enough to ask you more. What this means is that I do odd jobs for people that can't/won't take the time to do it themselves. Clearing clutter, pet-sitting, getting groceries or hauling off unwanted items.

Usually, after the clutter has been sorted, hauling off unwanted items is no big deal - I like using the SPACE system -

• S – Sort – sort through all the stuff.

• P – Purge – get rid of all trash and charity items.

• A – Assign – Choose a home for each of the items you're keeping.

• C – Containerize – Get the correct storage system in place for what you're keeping. For the price of a new DVD you can have a shelf to store 100 DVDs on.

• E – Equalize – When something new comes into your home, something old should go out.

Most items that you come up with from the sorting are small and easily loaded into a car and the charity stores are happy to receive them.

This time, however, the item in question was an old, heavy and broken piece of exercise equipment. It had had a good life and helped the boy train while playing soccer and baseball in high school. Now the lad was gone to college, almost graduated and was going into the Peace Corps after graduation. His parents were downsizing the household in preparation for a move to Florida for their retirement home. The 6 foot tall, 5 foot long and 3 foot wide piece of black metal had to go.

Right off the bat the main thing was that it was broken, charity thrift stores are not interested in broken items. They do not have repair shops where little elves sit and repair things good as new to find new life in another home. If a charity receives something that is broken it goes right out the back door into the big dumpster. I know that some people use charities as a disposal service for large items knowing that the charity will put their broken, big item into a dumpster for them instead of waiting for heavy trash day. But that's just rude.

The second problem is that a lot of charity stores are no longer receiving exercise equipment. Yep, it's true, there have been so many sales by the late night TV infomercials to people that never use the things, that even charities don't want the equipment darkening their doors. The stuff is heavy, it takes up a lot of room and it doesn't sell. So they just don't accept it any longer, at least in the Kansas City area.

While on a trip down to Florida to get the house ready for the upcoming move, my client charged me with getting rid of the exercise machine while they were gone. So the decision day was upon me. She didn't care what I did with it, so long as it went away.

I went over to the house with my tool box and let me tell you, that was one well constructed piece of equipment. The main body of the thing was welded together and must have weighed 100 pounds. The pulley bar, handle grips, foot rests and other pieces were bolted on with 5/8ths bolts and a braided cable that was almost as thick as a pencil provided the tension on the machine. The details don't matter but it took me over 4 hours to deconstruct and then load the machine onto my truck. I understood why the charity thrift stores don't want to accept them any longer.

Now what to do with it? It was way too heavy for me to even try to throw into an unwatched dumpster (which is illegal). Fortunately for me metal recycling has become a major industry and Kansas City being the metropolitan place that it is has 3 metal recycling places to choose from. I have recycled metal before. In the 70s when I was in college is when aluminum recycling first became popular. I was like so many others and collected cans in a container to take to the recycling place. You picked up some spare change and felt good about helping to save the environment. When I moved to Kansas City there used to be a truck that would park at a local shopping mall parking lot. You would take your metal to the truck, they would check to see what kind of metal it was, weigh it and pay you based on the type of metal that you brought them. Both were pretty low key, relaxed operations. Not so much any more.

I found the metal recycling addresses were in an industrial area, logically, and got the directions to drive over there. I'm passing junk yards, car reclamation and repair centers, tire retread centers and lots of heavy undergrowth on either side of the road. Semi-trucks are rumbling on the other side of the road hauling off what all the pick-up trucks, sometimes with trailers, on my side of the road are hauling in. The traffic wasn't really busy but it was steady.

I followed the truck ahead of me through an entrance with the name of the metal recycling place I had chosen and just followed him into a line of vehicles. They were checking in with a workman at the entrance. He would look at their load of metal, make a note on a yellow sheet with a large number on it and give it to the driver. When it was my turn, the same process occurred and he waved me on. The note he had written was 'SHRED'. At that point I stopped him and told him I hadn't been here before what was the process. He was very nice when I told him that and gave me quick directions on what to do. He had to be quick, when I pulled away 7 vehicles had queued up behind me just in that short conversation.

I joined another line waiting for the next part of the process. I had noticed a truck coming from the other direction swinging around to enter the line again which puzzled me, where had he come from on the back of the yard to get in line again? This line was the first part of weighing the metal that was brought into the yard. I watched carefully the vehicles ahead of me to see what they were doing and read all the signs that were posted. The vehicles pull onto a large ramp to about the mid point where they stop until there's a loud air horn sounded, then the vehicle pulls forward to get a receipt from a dispenser and moves off to the back of the yard. The signs read 'Move forward at 5 MPH' and 'Remain stopped until air horn sounds'. The entire ramp was the weight machine, similar to the semi-truck weigh stations that you see when you take a highway trip.

When it was my turn to pull onto the ramp I carefully drove forward and stopped about midpoint just across from a window where I could see someone standing in the office. I could hear a garbled voice through the loudspeakers but couldn't catch what was said. I looked at the window and held up my hands in the universal gesture of 'I don't understand' and the form there made a circular motion horizontally with their hand. Ahhh! That's where that truck had come from that I noticed before, something had not registered correctly and he had to circle around and be weighed again. Which is what I had to do. I made the 'OK' gesture and pulled (slowly) off the ramp and circled around again. The 7 vehicles that had been in line behind me were now in front of me.

Since I had been through the process once, even if it was unsuccessfully, I relaxed somewhat and started looking around. It was a typical work yard. Vehicles were moving in and out, workmen in hardhats were standing around talking and mostly ignoring the people hauling the metal in that paid their salaries. There were three different metal buildings set up at different spots in the yard that all the vehicles flowed to as they went through the process. There were bits of metal scattered across the parking lot and driving area that had water filled pot holes at irregular spacing. It was a junkyard, grimy and used. The thing that I really noticed was the noise. Not a rhythmic mechanical noise like an engine but a raucous, irregular banging and crashing of metal, voices, throaty diesel engines revving up and then dying down when the foot was taken off the gas and intermittent blasts of air horns. The noise was striking when you noticed it. But when I got busy again it receded into the background.

My turn on the weigh ramp came again quickly and this time I drove correctly onto the ramp to receive my weight receipt. Once again I followed the vehicle ahead of me to the next point in the process, unloading. There was a large mound of metal behind a row of concrete road barricades, two claw cranes were moving through the mound grabbing little mounds of metal where they were and moving them elsewhere. A workman directed you to an open spot for you to back up and you unloaded. Basically you dropped the metal on your side of the concrete barricades and when you left the claw operator moved it to the mound of metal that was moving towards the shredder.

I was directed to an open spot next to a tan mini-van. After backing into the designated slot, I grabbed my work gloves and moved to the back of the truck. I've unloaded my truck hundreds of times and this time I didn't even have to be careful. As I'm pulling pieces of metal out and throwing them into a pile, I hear this awful crunch right next to me and turn to see that the tan mini-van that is about 10 feet away has just been grabbed by one of the claw cranes. My first thought was that the crane operator had misjudged his arc and just wrecked someones vehicle. But a guy was standing there watching it all happen next to a truck that had a vehicle trailer attached to it. I watched also, with my mouth hanging open, as the crane operator lifted the van and then bounced it up and down on the ground until he knocked all four tires off of the van. The van was then lifted away and dropped onto a large conveyor belt that was feeding another large, noisy and powerful machine. It would either be shredded or crushed into a metal cube which would be sold to another car factory to be turned into next year's mini-van model. The guy picked up the tires and loaded them back onto the trailer and drove off.

At this point I realized that I still needed to finish unloading my truck. As I'm doing so the realization that they had to knock the tires off because they didn't want the tire rubber mixed in with the metal hits. There's another place to recycle the tires, right on this same road. And how much pressure is needed to break a vehicle tire from the axle? While ruminating on these thoughts, one of the workmen that I had seen talking earlier came over and checked with me on how I was doing. He had probably seen me watching with fascination what had happened to the van. I thanked him and dropped the last of the metal onto the small pile I had made. I took one more look at the metal claw monsters wandering around their enclosure while grabbing more metal bits to send to the hungry shredders and crushers before getting in my truck to go to the next part of the process.

Now that the metal was out of the truck I was directed to another weigh ramp where my truck and I were weighed again and I received another weight receipt. Comparing the two receipts showed that I had left almost 150 pounds of metal for the claw monsters to play with. The final part of the process was parking the truck and going into the last building where I dropped off the yellow identifier sheet I had been given and turned in the two weight receipts. For my afternoon adventure I was given $ 14.75 by a bored teen-ager sitting behind a plexiglass shielded window.

Metal recycling is way different than when I first started doing it.