welcome to a scrap life a podcast solely focused on the hustlers grinders operators and business owners who live and breathe the scrap metal industry every day we are the original recyclers no suits required just guts and hard work here is your host brett eckhart all right guys another episode of a scrap life i got the pleasure of uh calling uh john best into sitting down with me we’ve already done kind of a smaller shorter cliff notes version podcast for our recycled idaho but you know i met john um with argus media i met him via linkedin and you know when you just have that feeling that someone’s super passionate about uh an industry that you’re super passionate about and you want to just connect with them and kind of see what they’re up to that was kind of my introduction to john he’s a an aluminum guy through and through but truly a scrap guy and so i’m super stoked to sit down and uh interview you chop it up with you um so thanks for sitting down john good good good to finally lock you down yeah for sure when was the

last one we did it it felt like it’s been like time ago or months i want to say four or five months ago maybe it was like when we very first started doing recycled media um or recycled idaho we we just we wanted to kind of get some experts in their field and you being you know pretty strong um knowledge base on aluminum we’re like all right let’s get uh john on here let’s let’s talk about aluminum see where it’s going at that time aluminum was like a dollar or like 96 cents or something right oh yeah it’s it’s been a real roller coaster uh this morning you know uh you probably got it in your inbox but uh you know i shoot out that daily uh you know use beverage can email that i do because i do a daily survey at the market for us and uh so i put a little bit of macro a couple macro bullets in each one just so there’s something in there to you know to go on before i start my one-on-one conversations with everybody and uh this week we are um down

10 cents from last week um but we’re still we’re still really high though historically still weird time that i could fall 10 cents and you’re like oh it’s still pretty pretty up there you know 10 cents is a wild move in aluminum like just again like give some give people a little bit of color on like how big of a move is 10 cents in aluminum it’s like almost unheard of right yeah it’s it’s definitely uh head turning it’s it’s a kind of move where um you can you can expect that it may take scrap more than a week to adjust to it you know um it’s not like copper where we’re accustomed to seeing that somewhat regularly and uh you know there’s there’s just so much going on in the macro right now uh one of the big important things that i guess should be supportive of base metals you know copper aluminum and otherwise is uh evergrand was able to make uh an interest payment last night in china um which is like a good sign for china’s economy you know and at the bottom is not necessarily going to fall out

here um you know anybody’s not who hasn’t been following it you know we won’t discuss how that payment got made or where the exactly but that’s uh you know that’s actually kind of bullish i guess for base metals but um you know the thing that you’re also seeing is coal china’s been intervening on coal more this week and talking more about that and that’s cooled off the markets a little bit because energy you know over the past month has taken center stage whether it’s in europe or or china and i mean china it’s really been a longer term thing because you know for the past several months uh china has been trying to control you know industrial output um a lot of people say that it is you know running running up to the olympics trying to clear out the clear out the air and control pollution and that’s just before right i mean wasn’t it in 2012 i think was it i’m trying to think when the last olympics they had over there and they were they basically kind of shut down a lot of industrial production and trying to air because they

knew they were going to kind of be in the world spotlight it’s like a similar uh like i’m watching a similar movie or you know part of a similar uh deal again and they’ve been they’ve been doing this um you know in a sustained way for years and years now but it’s just sort of they become more aggressive at certain points and it becomes more noticeable um yeah i’m sure that you’ve heard about it but you know the the big the big you know fallout from that even more so than base metals has been you know silicon magnesium manganese all the hardeners that go into a lot of alloy you know base metal products and also ferrous products as well so all that output is kind of tied to the same grid that um is being cut back on um by them right now and it’s creating shortages everywhere it’s just you know the law of you know unforeseen consequences because uh most of that that production is concentrated in china we have a little bit of you know magnesium and silicon in the us but nowhere near you know independence or anything so

so for all the uh for all the people out there that don’t understand the role that say magnesium and silica play in the manufacturing of aluminum do you want to give us just like the cliff notes version without going too far into the chemistry just like what it takes to make an aluminum um ingot alloy sal that’s required for say a casting house or an aluminum sheet mill or whatever um like how many additives and how much of that is actually required to you know you can go into it go any direction you want but i just kind of want to give people maybe a little bit of background that don’t understand the uh the production side of aluminum before it actually gets made into something that they see on the store shelves yeah yeah and you know aluminum is one of those things where it’s it’s hard to talk about broadly sometimes because there’s just a bajillion alloys uh especially on the rot side you know so rolled rolled flat alloys but broadly speaking uh the magnesium um shortage is going to have a bigger effect on um coil and plate and sheet

and all that kind of stuff um because um for the most part a lot of cast alloys a lot of the common cast alloys you know that you use to make cast parts really you know when when they’re making those alloys they really don’t want magnesium in there but for rolled they do and uh silicon is really big for cast alloys so you know 380 um b390 uh just things that go into basically die cast aluminum parts that are pretty much everything mechanical you know small engines big engines uh you know automotive is the biggest and market for that stuff but it’s it’s kind of everywhere but um and then silicon also goes into some um you know uh rod alloys as well um but you know it’s just the the real issue is a lot of these um metals are created using an electrolytic process uh and so you know it’s it’s basically affecting a broad family of of of metals production um and you know there’s really a lot of that that that production is consolidated in china i’m not sure whether it migrated a lot from the us to china as

far as i don’t know if we’ve always relied on china you know in recent history but i’m sure at some point you know china seized market share from the rest of the world and um labor and labor and electricity costs were so much cheaper and i think that’s kind of where that big shift came from but when you say electrolytic process then the other thing that needs to be taken into consideration people understand is how much power is required to um smell you know manufacture these different alloys and i think that’s where what kind of gets lost too is in this energy transition is just how much power is required aluminum is a very um power intense um process correct definitely and um you know it’s it’s one of those things if you pay attention to the news i mean the the determining factor in the us especially where you know a lot of the power is sort of controlled by state either state monopolies or you know partially publicly privately owned companies um and it’s there’s not like a top-down federal thing you know um you look at you know kentucky or

the carolinas where a lot of these smelters are and every couple years you’ll see you know back and forth about them deciding whether to shut it down or or keep it open or shut down part of it and it’s it’s all about electricity and with china you know they receive subsidies uh that we really don’t get here in the us and it depends it varies by province a lot and i think the china’s willingness to do that is sort of like waning they’re going to try to allow some of this production that’s maybe less commercial or less beneficial to fall by the wayside um it feels like as they transition maybe from like say a third world the second world first world country you you know it feels like the the first step always is you know labor is cheap and you know you have these these um industries subsidized by government and then as maybe pollution or some of the other stuff takes hold or your society becomes you know a little bit more monetary really stronger and then all of a sudden you know as things start to flip and start to

change and either that stuff now begins to get outsourced or like to trickle down to another country you know where they pick up the slack on the manufacturing because they’re looking for that economic growth and you know china is trying to move into you know more of a you know they’re slowly transitioning to a similar service-based society service-based country like the u.s and you know i we we as a country we farmed out a lot of manufacturing we found farmed out a lot of processing um and you know as time goes by you know slowly that comes back into favor you know but it’s the transition is never easy and it always takes longer than one would think you know both sides well one of the things you see too it’s particularly relevant to aluminum is kind of moving moving away from primary and towards scrap you know uh china um you know has been been cracking down on uh you know buying sort of lower grade scrappings over from the us and sorting that over the past 10 years it’s been a very long process actually i think a little

bit longer than that i think green defense began a little bit before that technically but uh one of the other sides of that coin is cost of labor and you know sorting scrap is very labor intensive and there are people that get paid a lot to do it because they’re very good at it um and a lot of that stuff has migrated out of china to malaysia to indonesia um not just because of labor because i mean china’s also trying to again crack down on importing sort of dirtier scrap but um you know labor is also a big a big picture for it you know um it’s it’s cheaper to do it in those countries and it’s always gonna migrate that way because until everybody has heavy media plans and has made those investments um you know hand sorting is gonna continue to be uh the norm in a lot of places it takes time it takes time for sure so i i want to kind of like go back to the beginning because like this podcast really is about like individuals in the scrap industry they kind of love it that are uh

you know and and someday i’m gonna i’ve kind of put it out there someday like my vision with the scrap life is just to take it to other industries of people that are just scrappy and general right like hustling like dirty dirty jobs type stuff yeah they just kind of found a way to like love something that a lot of people might not love and then they found a way to like make it a career a business uh you know a lifestyle but for now because there’s so many like awesome people in this industry to like still talk to like i’m not gonna go there right i i still enjoy just talking to the real like scrap people that just love the industry like i do and and i obviously you know i i read your your story we talked about a little bit earlier that your friend um tell me his name again stephen forrester student forester rogue and he posted an article on linkedin that’s kind of like what i came across that and i was like man like i need to get all the jaw and then just and i’d have

the conversation again so um long story short um you didn’t grow up in the scrap business you didn’t grow up in this industry um but you kind of found your way in much like a lot of people i talked to they find their way in and they never find their way out because they just fall in love with it um whether you’re at that stage or not i feel like you know the stuff you post like you’re pretty i’m there i’m in love with it you know guilty i feel like you’re in so that was the reason for me to reach out to you but why don’t you just give me a little bit of background on uh you know what you did previously and kind of how you how you made it into uh the scrap metal recycling industry yeah i i got a degree in communications with the focus in in print journalism so i i wrote for a couple of um magazines outside of metals i wrote for a lot of oil and gas magazines mostly on the engineering side you know sort of taking taking case studies and adapting them

into you know sort of feature articles making them a little easier to read and then interviewing you know subject matter experts to flesh it out and you know sort of fact check myself and so i was already in oil and gas which is a space that argus is really big in and um you know i didn’t even know that argus had metals um or uh some of the other commodities they covered they’re outside of energy uh but you know i went to argus um you know uh i went there for an interview figured it would be all oil and gas met a lot of the editors uh liked a lot of them uh gotta get along with pretty much everybody uh but um you know me and uh the person who was doing medals at the time uh we hit it off really well and uh i didn’t really know what metal i was going to do uh he assigned to me aluminum and uh i i you know thought that was pretty cool but also just didn’t have very much information to you know have an informed opinion on it but i was

like okay we’re gonna go with this and they just kind of just tell you to go out and destroy the wolves and just say what are they i mean because i mean it’s kind of i’ve heard you know i know there’s kind of two schools of thought like i can tell you everything i know and kind of influence your beliefs or if i hire you and say i want you to just go out and learn you were gonna you were gonna learn maybe some stuff that i never would have thought or you’re going to leave go down a different path than maybe i would have led you down but you might have found a bad way well he gave me a list of uh i mean he he helped me along and i got some some training from him uh you know just what he knew but also uh i did a lot of cold calling which served me well in the long run because i feel like you know i cold call all the time now because you have to find people that are either you know uh well that are willing to

talk and also have the time to talk um you know whether it’s on the buy side or the sell side but i talk to a lot of a lot of dealers and i won’t name them on here just in case you know people are not comfortable with that but yeah i almost wish i could because i had so many i had so many people that were more patient with me than i ever would have expected because i really i think now hopefully i have something to offer them when i give them a call we can i can kind of maybe you know give them some information that is helpful and we can kind of have it back and forth but in the beginning you don’t you don’t have anything to offer and you just you’re the one asking all the questions and so what year was that that you you started you were cold calling uh 2015. okay so do you feel like because i feel like and and i would like to think if there’s anything that i can kind of put a stamp on my industry it’s my goal is to get

people to open up and talk to people about how like what we’re doing right i mean i’m not telling you to give away trade secrets i’m not trying to tell people to give away but i’m also saying like at some point as an industry we have to speak up and say like you know stand up for ourselves and say hey this is all the good stuff we’re doing right and then even to go even deeper is to stand up and say here’s all the good suppliers here’s all the good consumers and help promote those people and then as a you know as a final piece be open up open up to guys like yourself um in the in the industry that are kind of helping us determine pricing structure for our customers and whatever else um if there’s anything i hope to promote it’s just a little more openness in a kind of an old school industry right yeah because i think a lot of people and you know god bless them it makes it makes sense to some you know how they have their their book of business and they don’t need to

talk to anybody else and you know they don’t necessarily need to be super transparent or you know out there in the conference circuit like you know they’re happy and making money but at the same time though um i don’t know it’s you know it’s always nice to meet new people and uh you know hopefully some of those people come out of their shell a little bit more as they’re given more opportunities with stuff like linkedin or um you know or as as you know new family members enter the business or whatever because there’s there’s just so many more um you know there’s a limited number of consumers but with dealers um you know i’ll never meet them all and a lot of them are just really cool and i you know try to meet as many as possible so so what are like what are the similarities between say the oil and gas industry the oil industry and aluminum like what are the i’m curious what the similarities are and then maybe like what the big differences are well there’s a lot of a lot of problem solving um you know for for oil

and gas you have you know upstream um you know emp stuff where they’re trying to get the oil out of the ground and do it economically and somewhat environmentally and for scrap i mean you know scrap is a resource that we have and um we’re trying to figure out how to use it properly i mean specifically to aluminum i really enjoy reading about all the engineering advancements that they that have been made in uh you know sorting and you know all the different things that help segregate scrap into useful you know packages um i don’t i think that that’s that’s the main overlap is that we have this resource but it’s also not this ready to go type thing we have to get it in shape where it can be economically consumed and you know it’s it’s a lot of work and uh some people are really really passionate about it and those are the people i like to like to talk to you know the people that talk about how to make a uh make a good package i don’t know you want to go into the weeds with people and you know

particular dealers especially and you know they talk about you know the way that they prepare and sell and bail and segregate their scrap with such pride like i’m just trying to make a good product uh you know i want i want to you know strengthen the relationship by what i send people i stand behind it i think that’s it’s just interesting because what really you’re taking is you know waste metal and you’re cleaning it up to this this particular standard where it looks pretty and is i don’t know just just the transformation is just fascinating to me well i guess i never really thought about that way is i mean oil you’re basically you know you’re it’s like you’re mining it essentially out of the ground and then it you take it out of the ground you and there’s various forms of crude there’s different there’s different quality levels depends on your region depends on you know whether it’s you know whether it’s north america south america or russia i think it’s all various grades from what the way i understand it i’m no expert and that feels like that’s kind of how the

scrap aluminum industry is there’s all different grades there’s all different qualities in the beginning it’s all it’s all over the place you have to put it together as the dealer you have to accumulate a package you can sell and it’s almost like the refinery is kind of like the smelter you know another analogy doesn’t work perfectly for steel because there’s other stuff that happens but you know well the technology that’s really came you know as of late you know i think one of the positive things of you know the hand sorting you know chinese um hand sorting some of these other um other countries doing the hand sort on the uh non-ferrous coming off of the shredders and and kind of and countries wanting to slow that down um or take less of it or take a cleaner spec or whatever has really pushed the technology and kind of force people’s hand to either invest in the technology or take a significantly lower price for their material um so it’s i mean if there’s been any good come out of uh of it i mean that’s got to be one of the big

one of the big advantages it’s kind of forced people’s hand on the technology side right yeah i mean the the the amount of um you know sorting technology we’ve seen go in i mean even just kind of in my neck of the woods uh you know i’m sitting here in houston uh sort of gulf coast like you know us south um you know we’ve got got levitated got audubon’s new plant we’ve got uh altec uh the ultra joint venture and then um schnitzer put in a uh plant in georgia that uh started not too long ago and this stuff like two years ago not all of these projects were even publicly talked about and maybe some of them weren’t even on the table um yeah so you see a plant are you talking about a heavy media plant yeah yeah have heavy media and you know some of them some of those are consuming their own shred internally and some of them are buying you know zorb on the spot market and then making twitch and selling that and exporting it even uh it’s it’s you know what i think that’s one of the

the biggest game changers that happened this year is that there’s always been a little bit of an export market for twitch which again anybody listening doesn’t know twitch is like it’s basically a um a floated aluminum scrap package so the light fraction that’s made out of aluminum that comes from you know car shred that’s floated and uh what you’re left with is a very clean aluminum product mostly cast aluminum um but you know there’s always been a little bit of an export market for that uh but you know at the beginning of the summer uh that really took off for the first time and i was talking to people regularly who are sending their twitch overseas um which is fascinating that’s only going to drive you know more investment in this stuff um you know it’s it’s really um having being able to rely on either the export market or the domestic market depending on what’s going on uh really helps justify the investments you know yeah and it’s just and if you if you’ve never seen a heavy media plan um in person i’d strongly encourage if you have a passion for the

recycling industry you know super cool dude if you’ve never seen one i’m in really an operation the first one i seen was uh um my dad is really good friends with uh jay rabinovitz from altar trading nice and jay used to work at schnitzer when i was coming up so we always and we were you know a 50 50 joint venture partner with schnitzer right almost 20 years and so i was lucky enough to be able to see what schnitzer was doing on the shredder level you know big yard you know big yard level i actually went down to uh toured their alabama and georgia yards um earlier in my career where they have a big wire chopping line down in atlanta also very cool yeah which is very cool process in itself um and so when jay went to alter we have every we always stayed in touch and uh probably three years ago maybe maybe it’s going on four man time flies but um my dad and i flew up to st louis to go um spend some time with jay and shoot the and just you know and say hi and

tour some of his yards that they have up there and they took us to their heavy media plant i think it’s in milwaukee i figured out what they have to have they’ve got one they’ve got one in davenport and they used to have one um it was in davenport yeah that’s the one that’s functioning now because they used to have one quick in wisconsin i think that got idled a smaller one at the beginning yeah i think it was it was a quick flight from st louis to davenport if i recall and uh and so we went there and we walked that plant and at that time they had you know they’re they’re feeding multiple shredders into that plant um and it’s just it was eye-popping right like i’m old school i come from you know basic scrap you know we don’t own a shredder i have no plans to open a shredder i like the the style business that we do but it doesn’t mean i’m not fascinated by it doesn’t mean that i’m not super intrigued by the process and kind of what happens to our material at the end um

and just walking through that and seeing that separation you know everybody’s you know built the you know the back end non-ferrous um procurement side off the off the shredder and then take it even one step further and go to that heavy media separation um it’s just a it’s cool it’s it’s a you know it’s something that’s coming back in style it used to be big i mean i’ve a history of it from what i understand say 30 40 years ago 30 years ago you know there was more heavy media plans and people started going away from them because of water issues and i think contamination issues and then there was better markets for just you know selling it the way it was and so they then technology investment wasn’t worth it um from a revenue side and then with everything kind of getting uh slowed down on you know shipping you know less processed material to these other countries say like china now it’s kind of comes back into style comes back you know and the technology’s gotten exponentially better as well um but now the other thing you have to know is

you have uh you have a lot of x-ray um systems as well which they can’t necessarily do all the same things as a wet system but um again if somebody wants to avoid the water aspect of it which can be complicated and expensive you can kind of you know produce a cleaned up package that yeah is twitch to some not twitch to others kind of depends on who you’re selling it to of course yeah it goes all back to the consumer right like what’s their tolerance level of the product you know yeah and with that comes price you know and i think that’s the that’s what everybody’s chasing is you know what if like if i can’t ship it to this country and i can’t ship to that one i’ve always said if you make a good product then the goal the best recycling companies that i know of and this is what i kind of learned as coming up in the business the better product you make the more options you have the more options you have the better you are going to be in the long run because the key to

our business is options you never want to back yourself into a corner back yourself into a spot where you only have one consumer or two right so your goal is always to give yourself as many options as possible for your product and how do you do that well you you clean it up you create a product that is a more people want to consume and b they want to consume it from you because they they know what they’re going to get i think a lot of people were scared to invest in some of this stuff though i mean just just broadly um you know new processing technology though because china is kind of unpredictable with what they’re going to do but i think people have realized that you know it’s not that china’s not a big determining factor anymore but um there’s more to it than just china and if you make an investment and china changes the rules there’s still other countries you can ship to there’s there’s plenty of you know u.s consumers um that you know you can make inroads with i think but i know for a while like

you know when i would ask people about that um you know if what’s holding you back for making an investment if there’s anything it’s that it’s like what is china gonna do next you know if we’re gonna we’re gonna do x and china is gonna change it up on us again but uh that hasn’t you know it hasn’t stopped people clearly there’s uh a lot so here’s the story in 2010 we bought we wanted to expand our you know our footprint so we bought a building in boise i know and it i always i always wanted to have a wire chopper because i was selling insulated copper wire to china and it was always getting downgraded as i was always getting acclaimed or whatever it’s like oh it’s not 80 it’s 76 you know which you get tired of those you know three percent four percent like you know they’re always there’s it’s just never it was never the you know the percentage and some of that is maybe i’m trying to sell it too high or whatever the case may be but i said my goal is to in our new facility i

want to put a wired chopping line in you know and this was in 2011 and so 10 years ago we put our first wire chopping line in and people were like why are you putting in a wire trapping line don’t you want to pay the ass do you know how much work that is and i said i know i’m just i just want to know that whatever i chop i it is what it is right if i if i call it 80 and it comes out 75 that’s on me it’s not anybody else it’s on me and but if i call it 80 it comes out 85 great you know so we made the investment and like looking back it was the best investment we made because what basically what we were doing is saying we want to make ourselves a product that’s consumable here in the united states but also if other countries step up and they want to pay you can still export it then you can export it right and at that time you know we were making a domestic product um and that was kind of important to us i

mean everybody watched my stuff i’m like i’m pretty pro american i’m pretty pro like hey let’s keep it in house if we can let’s let’s let’s let’s support our our base the best we can and not because i don’t export stuff but it’s just like if there was i saw a product that i could make that could be that could be consumed here um and plus i was just tired of the headaches and and now i mean i look around and there’s a lot of people putting in wire chopping lines probably for the last you know few years yeah you were you were ahead of the curve i mean i think that was that was the the talk for a while it feels like that’s a similar process what you’re talking about is that’s where people have got to the point where like i’m just going to make a really good product i’m going to make the investment and i’m just going to the consumers will find me because they know i’m going to make a good product right that’s consumable domestically export whatever and the thing too that that is that is still

ongoing and you know it’ll be a while i think before we have a long-term answer to this but you know really not a lot of twitch or zorba’s going to china or hong kong right now malaysia’s phasing in you know some stricter standards um you know the only country that’s really going the opposite direction is indonesia is kind of um you know loosened up on their contained waste standards a little bit but overall though i mean i’m hoping that these investments uh it would be cool if like you said if some of these investments resulted in some of this upgraded material you know staying in the u.s and yeah you know we don’t really we don’t really export ingot anywhere i mean not not in huge quantities like you know aluminum and get you know derived from scrap but maybe that’s the next step i mean uh you you never know i mean but um my take is on that and i’d be i’d be curious on yours john but whoever can figure out how to generate this is that good moving forward right whatever country can figure out how to generate

the cheapest power is going to be the next big aluminum player and the cheapest i want to say green power because there’s everything some of these countries you know that this the crackdowns coming right whether it’s internal external um you know other countries putting pressure on other countries you know investors putting pressure on customers putting pressure so i feel like whatever country can kind of harness the most green power whether that’s hydrogen whether that’s nuclear whether that’s solar whether that’s i mean you can make the case for any of it or you can make the anti-case for any of it i’m sure but i feel like because because aluminum manufacturing is so energy intense i feel like that’s the next big you know you know i’m talking you know a decade or whatever down the road maybe longer whatever country can harness and that generate that the most cost efficient power has got the best chance to you know really take the aluminum market to the next and that’s what you’ve seen with primary i mean um you know the the gulf aluminum council the gac region um you know the middle east

i mean that’s one of the fastest growing areas because of the access to uh you know uh affordable power and um yeah i mean i’m sure secondary you know and re-melt aluminum may may also follow that trend at some point too um but um yeah i mean there’s there’s just so many things going on right now in the us uh and you know in the export market but people have stepped up and made a lot of investments and you know it’ll be really interesting to see um you know how those how those pay off yeah so so change gears a little bit john like what is it about the scrap industry that kind of that you that you enjoy the most of like what is it that’s kind of sucked you into the vortex and not uh not let you out easily the people yeah i love i love talking on the phone with people and just keeping up with them and just uh i don’t know just just the stories they tell and and i don’t know that part of it is has has always been the best and that’s whether i’m

talking to somebody on the phone or whatsapp or email people just share so much with me um you know bit business-wise you know business related and otherwise and i just really um you know uh hope that uh i continue to have those conversations with people i think the minute that i stop having you know those kind of interactions it might you know i might not like it as much but i still like that you know all the all the metal and technical aspects but it’s definitely who is who who is who is involved in all those things that really powers it the people make our business and i i really believe that that’s one of the reasons like i love this podcast is i mean i don’t monetize i don’t make any money off of it it probably takes time away from my my schedule but i feel like then like the return on the investment is good for me from just the people standpoint right the people i get to talk to like hear what they got what they got going on and so that is my that is how i monetize

it i monetize it and just you know the people side and being able to shoot the with people that are interested in the same thing you are but also i mean that’s one of the things you know about the scrap industry yeah it’s still there’s still some old school components to it but the old school stuff that’s lasted is the is the relationships and the handshake deals and the hey i’m gonna tell you what i’m selling this for john just publish it without you know like put it in there so everybody has a good guideline but i don’t really know where it came from type of you know communication um and i hope that with the consolidation that’s going on i’m not gonna say it’s good or bad but i just i hope that um you know ten years from now we still have a lot of uh you know still still have a lot of independently owned businesses out there um that uh that that have all those those family ties and those family stories and that you know all the consolidation we’re seeing from the steel maker side of things doesn’t sort

of suppress that you know that’s my it’s gonna make it tougher you know it’s like any time you get you know you build up a few monopolies or you build ups you know in one industry or another they kind of have a way of sucking the gas out of you know the little guys but making it so expensive to operate and you know either you got to grow with it or you’ve gotta you know i mean you’re gonna get stomped out and you know i think you can fight the battle for a long time but it’s just what what i feel like what happens when you get these big consolidation moves is it just makes it more expensive for the little guy to to stay in business you know all the regulatory pieces and parts um of it it starts to become a little tougher for the average you know one-yard two-yard guy to to really thrive because you know what the cost of doing business is just so much more yeah yeah for for sure and you know i think that uh as more consolidation happens i feel like the smartest

thing for these larger companies to do is to really um make sure that they don’t take for granted the the the families within the companies they’re acquiring and like that sort of stored knowledge um and you know allow people to sort of be regional and run themselves and not centralize everything that’s kind of the way of the public company is to centralize everything but at the same time though you know at that local level there’s a lot of like know-how that may not be in headquarters so and a lot of relationships these that these companies and individuals have formed it goes all the way back to relationships but a lot of these relationships that people are put into place and uh whether it’s you know vendors or you know other recycling companies whatever they they’ve kind of kind of locked into places kind of got them to where they where they’re at today and you have to make sure that transition is is handled correctly in my opinion right i know you like you were saying you you have perspective on the whole um you know sort of uh larger public scrap company

i think because of your partnership with uh with schnitzer yeah and what that’s helped that helped us i mean i i i’m so grateful every day i mean for the opportunity to be partners with schnitzer for as long as we were because it taught us a lot it taught us how to think like a big business but then every day we had to kind of live in our own little world over here in idaho and in oregon and just trying to kind of and still do the day-to-day run of small business right and i think that if you know the the advice the the knowledge that we were given on kind of how to mature and think more big picture think like i was just having this conversation um yesterday with uh with john sacco and i said you know that’s one thing that schnitzer taught us was just kind of how to think about different things whether it was finances or growth you know how do you do it you know and and and it really gave us i feel like it gave us an edge um just because it gave

us kind of an extra an extra piece of knowledge that you don’t get unless you’re kind of in bed with somebody right you’re that they you rely on them that that day-to-day and so i’m always you know i you know i don’t ever talk i’m not a much of a talker in general other than just to my family and friends just because just back and forth banter but um you know and we when we when we ended our relationship with schnitzer it was our goal to end as amicable and as you know as as peaceful as possible i mean we did you know we i still sell them a crazy amount of material every month and i still have a lot of good friends there um but you know we were better off as you know a family-owned operation i think luckily we’re you know we’re decent sized enough that we could weather the you know the storms of you know the regulatory side and whatever else but we got that knowledge we got that um you know that how to operate you know a little bit bigger than maybe we

were and that helped us out of time sure so give me a little background on uh you’re you have uh married you have kids what what a single guy what do you got i’m i’m engaged right now we’re gonna get married in uh december and so we’ve we’ve made a lot of the preparations already on that and um houston yeah yeah i’m gonna get married uh on buffalo well we’re gonna have the reception on buffalo bayou so kind of in the middle of the middle of the city downtown um and you know with with kovid um we’re not 100 sure what the outcome is going to be as far as who’s attending but um you know we’ve we’ve gotten a lot of rsvps and things seem to be going well so i’m not as worried as i was a you know six months ago so i figured this year and probably even next year the wedding venue businesses are gonna be crazy because there’s a lot of weddings that just got put off oh yeah yeah i know we decided that um you know before we knew what it was going to be like

uh you know in the latter part of the year that even if things went south we were still going to have some kind of wedding we haven’t delayed ours once like some people have but we were like we’re not we’re not going to do that we have to we have to power through even if it’s smaller or different than we want it to be because you know if you keep delaying it like who who knows what next year is going to be like or the year after you just gotta you know bite the bullet yeah exactly and i think if coven this whole deal has taught anybody anything i’m i’m hoping it’s taught everybody to be a little more resilient and just say you know it ain’t everything isn’t going to be perfect it’s not going to be you know like and everybody’s handles it a little bit differently i’m hoping it gives you a little bit more patience everybody a little bit more patience for each other but it’s not it’s never going to be perfect it’s never gonna be exactly the way you want it you’re just gonna have to find a

way to battle through it so i guess that’s my hope at the end of the day where this thing goes it’s just teach everybody a little bit more grit yeah yeah and to not not uh not take meeting people in person or opportunities to meet people in person for granted because you never you never know what’s gonna happen you know you’ve been able to now get back out on the kind of the trade show circuit a little bit this year yeah i got to go to um uh israeli gulf coast in san antonio this summer and then a couple weeks ago i was in chicago for the round table and uh you know some of our argus people have attended some of the other israeli chapter events how are those events going from your standpoint are people excited to be back in the because i haven’t went to one yet i’m going to go to vegas um this march but are people kind of genuinely excited to see each other again yeah the mood the mood was really uh was pretty positive um i mean uh there’s there’s a lot of a lot of

people that i wanted to see were there um and i was surprised at how few people that i i was you know planning on seeing decided to last minute to not go and actually i found the opposite there were some people i talked to a couple weeks before chicago where they were like yeah sorry i’m not gonna go i’m just you know being careful and then i find out that they decided to come at the last minute but i think attendance was still kind of off from normal i think it was like half of what it normally is but uh the energy there was good i mean people it didn’t it didn’t feel like a ghost town um i feel like vegas stuff done i feel like vegas could be a good year um i’m excited to see i’m excited to see some people i haven’t got to see for a while um see some people i’ve only talked to be assumed um but i feel like vegas usually gets a good turnout and then where it’s kind of been off the last two years we had a virtual one last year i feel

like there’s some gonna be some opportunity to you know just to see a bunch of people that i’ve been looking forward to shaking hands with drinking a beer with um and so i’m looking forward to vegas here about four or five months um so looking forward to the trade show with myself yeah yeah i’m hoping to get out to vegas or consumer’s night or something you know in the first half of next year we’ll see what maybe maybe maybe uh some of the other conferences as well some of the not scrap ones yeah so so parting shot where do you see where do you see and not price wise but how do you see this aluminum market um going the next few next few months where do you i mean you talk to a lot of people in this in that industry in that on that side of the business um where does this thing trend you know i’m i’m really not i’m really not sure and uh i’ve definitely sort of made a lot of guesses and predictions sort of internally that i didn’t share with people and i was wrong about most

of them uh you know the transaction i mean i think this week is a perfect example of why it’s so hard because um you know we reached a uh we reached a new 2021 high uh going back all the way to uh you know um 2008 um and then you know so up up 10 cents down 10 cents i mean the volatility is incredible right now and uh i think i don’t think that changing i don’t see the volatility i feel like it’s the thing you know it’s going to get more volatile or similar volatility i feel like it’s a traders market right now you know i think there’s i think the thing that’s going to keep maybe keep things supported or like make it hard for things to just go through the floor is the fact there’s a lot of dislocation uh there’s a lot of um whether it’s scrap or primary aluminum or maybe even the bauxite alumina i don’t cover those markets but i know that they’re affected a lot by freight um all these things are you know suffering from like a really fragmented logistics market uh and then you

know all of the sort of top level information i hear about that on supply chains is that that’s not going to be normal for a while and so that that kind of makes it hard for prices if anything to come down too much because freight is such a big component makes sense well man i appreciate you taking the time and uh i enjoy watching your posts and stuff on linkedin because i can tell you you haven’t you have that passion for for the industry you know like a lot of us do so don’t stop doing it you know i enjoy it i’m sure a lot of people do out there and like i said i appreciate you taking the time good talking to you and i look forward to drinking one of those ipa beers you post every once in a while i look forward to drinking one of those with you one of these days sounds good thanks for having me all right talk soon all right take care all right