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Shadrach Rice with Scrap Wanted Recycling talked to us about scrap metal recycling and the difference between his company and others.

Shadrach has been in the recycling business for “going on 20 plus years now” and he got started through his father. His father tasked him with taking apart electronics that he couldn’t sell and that has blossomed into a metal recycling business. Shadrach calls himself “an equal opportunity scrapper” which has led him to some interesting finds and challenges which have kept his spark alive for recycling. He has currently gotten into fluorescent tube recycling.

There is no job too big or small when it comes to his company. He has done jobs that help clean up piles of trash in the back of someone’s backyard all the way to entire estates. He will always try to help his clients get rid of what they want while recycling what he can in the meantime.

Many junk haulers will pick up everything and haul it straight to the landfill even though many pieces still have life or a second use. Many times this is because it is cheaper to buy the same item new than to fix it. That is not how Shadrach was brought up and not how operates his business. He has based his business model on reuse and recycle instead of replace.

Scrap Wanted Recycling’s Unique Business Model

Shadrach is consentience of recycling what he can and giving his clients credits back for the money made off of those materials. Shadrach stated that he believes that, “everything has a new home, you just got to find it.” With every job, Shadrach looks at minimizing what gets put into the landfill.

His goal when working with his clients is to not only help you remove what needs removed, which may involve a fee, but hopefully he can do it for free or end up paying his clients for the recycling in the job. Shadrach is unique in the fact that he credits his recycling against the bill so that if there are a lot of recyclable materials, he may end up paying his clients instead. How cool is that!

How does recycling make money?

Metals have value, no matter what form they are in. At the scrap yard, Shadrach shows up with his trailer and they unload all of the metal on the trailer and he gets paid on the net weight. Metals are easily recycled making them able to be melted down and reused. This can be cheaper than harvesting new materials from the ground. Shadrach is always amazing when he goes to the landfill all of the materials that end up there that would have been so easy to recycle instead.

Copper is a primary example used in this podcast, especially since the cost of copper is through the roof at the moment. Shadrach likes to inform people that if an item is 60% metal or more than the item can be recycled. Appliances are great examples of items that Shadrach takes to get recycled. Even though there is a lot of plastic involved, there is also a lot of metal! The recycling scrap yard looks at the balance between the metal and the “fluff”. Shadrach believes that within his lifetime we will be mining landfills for the metal that we have so haphazardly thrown away since there is so much value in these mostly metal items as well as some of the plastics.

Recycling “Fluff”

The shredders at the recycling scrap yard refer to the materials left over after they have grinded up the item as fluff. Fluff is the plastic and other materials that get stripped away from the item and disposed of. The shedders use a magnet first and then an eddy current to get any remaining metal out. An eddy current is going to take an electromagnetic field to repel (instead of attract like the magnet did) any remaining metals in the fluff.

Metals that are nonferrous, meaning they don’t contain iron or steel, are pushed out in this process. This is pretty effective at removing the majority of the metal. Shadrach says that their metal pile contains pieces as small as toothpicks. This process may be repeated by other companies. The scrapper that Shadrach uses in Denver ships their fluff to another company that runs it through the process again removing even more, if not all, of the remaining metal out of the fluff. By this time the fluff is mostly plastic and foam.

Mining Landfills

Shadrach has been talking with a fellow recycler who is currently buying landfills that were open in the 30’s to dig for the cars that were thrown away. Cars were mostly metal at the time and are great recyclable material. Shadrach believes that we will not only be seeing more of this in the future, we will also be mining for some of the plastics as an energy source. We have the technology to place these plastics into the incinerator with the proper scrubbers and create additional energy. This is very common in Europe and other parts of the world. At one of these incinerators in Europe, where Shadrach lived for a time, he became very familiar with the materials that he saw going into the building and located around it.

How it worked