Image and caption credit: Lexey Swall/For the Washington Post. Trucks offload scrap at Joseph Smith & Sons recycling center in Capitol Heights, Md.
On my way to and from campus, I ride by a metal scrapyard (the scenic view, n’est ce pas?). Without getting close enough to read, it’s not hard to tell that a sign on the gate has to do with licensing and fraud (among the icons and logos, McGruff the Crime Dog). It hadn’t occurred to me that black market trade in used metal might find its way here, a block off a busy suburban avenue. Dark alley exchanges of copper pipes and cables seemed more like it. Nevertheless, the sign cued up questions of how the industry works.
Typically, any vehicles coming in or out or parked in the lot are conventional enough work trucks, some heavier than others, probably delivering from demolition sites. I’ve also seen individuals pushing shopping carts overloaded with cans and other small pieces of scrap roll in, so there’s variety in the modes and means of collection.
This weekend, you might have seen the Washington Post Magazine piece on two guys whose scrap business rides a precarious edge between commercial boom and bust, between reliable equipment and dying pickups, between stable employment and fluctuating profits. On the shopping-cart approach: “Then there are the guys who push carts or ride bikes. Digging through trash bins for aluminum cans, searching alleys and vacant lots for treasure, they might slide $20 into their pockets each day.” The article gets at an intersection of waste, recycling, and money we haven’t addressed much during our year of Trash: bigger than household garbage but not yet at the scale of large commercial demolition and construction. These guys pick up old stoves, metal shelving, and when they’re lucky, nonferrous waste they refer to as “precious metals.” I don’t mean to conflate this sort of business with a life of shipbreaking on the Indian Ocean coast, but there’s a connecting line between those who turn enormous ships into junk and these DC metal scrap sellers. Metal–in the form of beer cans and supertanker hulls–makes money.
It isn’t just metal, a resource with easily understandable value. Those large clothing collection bins shuffled up against parking lot edges are an appealing way to pass along things we no longer wear. Instead of delivering to Goodwill or Value Village or a shelter, we can execute a drive-through donation on the way to work. Trouble is, there’s a varying degree of benefit. At least a few large businesses take the clothes gathered in bins, bale them up, and sell them on an international market at a profit. In New York, residents complained when the bins took over sidewalks, and both the city and a few reporters had trouble getting owners to answer the phone, let alone remove a bin. There’s nothing inherently unjust in collecting what might otherwise go to a landfill and selling it abroad, and to be clear, some local charities collect clothing this way, but there are at least questions to ask about the good done. Consider Marc Gunther’s follow-up to his Guardian article, in which he compares the benefit of fabric reuse to plastic recycling. Could those used garments have helped locally? Once they land in, say, Tanzania, are they undercutting a local market? Did donors think they were more likely to travel from the bin to those in need by way of a nonprofit?
What’s the difference between a two-person metal scrap collector picking up your used conduit and selling it to the yard and the company that sells your old Team-Building Exercise ’99 T-shirt to an international fabric broker?
Either way, there’s money in waste, and there are implications to how all kinds of scrap are sold.