welcome to recycled Idaho for two recycling industry veterans bread Eckart nick snyder explore idaho businesses and organizations that are putting in the work to keep idaho environmentally and economically viable at the same time take a listen to how these entrepreneurs business owners and operators from making things happen in a great state of Idaho in this tour with Joe Cheatham from North birdie Auto Salvage we get the opportunity show Joe or the scrap is Auto solids producing goes how it’s getting processed for end consumers check it out yeah you brought me here right if you got that machine to turn the wire the water trough the debugging wait here for a while right after we hope they said it was 11 11 nice 6061 shavings this is the newer machine this is the older machine this you can tell by the size of the puck it’s pitch the same machine because this one has bigger tooling so you can get more throughput smaller tooling less throughput school we buy shitload of shavings what are the shavings come from people manufacturing stuff out of 6061 aluminum like these are all 6061 and with it is

that this does this shavings from here in the Boise area yeah this is all for the most part like this is all pretty much coming out of Boise you know I just and it’s it’s just a couple of different what’s up is that it just produce 61 turn what are they manufacturing these guys are doing everything from motorcycle parts to gun pieces so like there’s a we have Auto as a pretty good like base of gun manufacturers they’re like a lot of people don’t know about no kids but yeah i Boise has it a kind of a more of a tech manufacturing background a lot of people really know about yeah I didn’t know about that yeah we built West Rail was that ready after their reclaiming it yeah what class of it that we have yeah that’s something you would you wouldn’t have to think you’d be dealing with shavings is dealing with liquids yeah state-of-the-art man that’s not that’s not form that way it’s extruded that way what’s all this one waste generated from this is anywhere from my window manufacturer manufacturer okay decking okay lots of trash I

can recognize some of that stuff now yeah I mean you see like the side rails right there yeah but that is this one all my balloons Chandler yeah this is RV like awning okay see where they slip the the piece in and then use the roll we can kind of walk I know I know they’re not running that wire chopper now but you’ve seen that right I’ve seen the wire chocolate before yeah when I first got it it’s the same it’s the same setup same same feel we had a power surge here two days ago it fried one of the processors in our baler in the the computer park it controls the mother boiler and citizen all it earlier Wow so we’re waiting on part that sucks yeah cuz that puts us when we can’t bail we end up with like this oh yeah where we just like like that needs to be failed let me see it starts like encroaching on our you know our basically our path guys that run through this everyone oh yeah so one ran over that one is a yellow down here what well so those are only

good for so many years and and then they they pull them out and put new ones in and recycle them okay okay that’s probably more what we see okay okay I mean here’s where we cut all the converters ah do we sort and cut those right here I’ve seen it on video but I haven’t seen it in person before nice so they’ll be rock our first one and then on to it okay the second one and then j-just put this dust collector in fairly fairly recently it’s always improving yeah badass vacuum another shear that’s a good thing though yeah yeah well now we can get through twice as much okay this is where all your get touched here a couple times yeah I’ve seen them on video before yeah I recognize that James doing the tick-tock now okay but he finally got me to download the tick-tock up and watch this up good yeah it’s a good thing you know oh I’ve seen I got my wife to look at it one time she’s like a tick tock dude now I look over all I should be on the couch the

kids advances busted yeah my wife was like isn’t that just for kids tik-tok I’m like well those kids have parents those condensers they pick a building down or something to get all those yeah so those are probably out of a big like rooftop unit so we’ll get the big rooftop units in break them down tear the tin off and make them go away to get the freon pumped out of it get all ready to go and then they’ll fly the new ones in and the old ones out while the cranes on site and they Zep considered mostly copper there it’s aluminum copper yeah it’s just I don’t know it’s a zone look I got you okay a woman so it depends on the unit’s like depends on the size and what we have going on is sometimes we’ll clean off this galvanized field piece we’ll make it a clean copper brass radiator and sometimes if it’s just too gnarly been a nasty-looking and let’s leave it on okay okay so the cost of lavery have to determine if the labor is worth the exactly you have to decide whether you want to

mess how much you have mess with it which I think that’s the biggest thing anymore yeah there’s a point of diminishing returns yeah like a good piece of salvage job like you know that deal every day you have to is it worth like there was a time like when I was a kid we would clean aluminum sheet we would literally take the torch when we cut all the staples oh yeah to make that clean aluminum sheet well I remember when we used to sell radiators to you guys years ago we just take the tanks off and take the straps off and do all that stuff oh yeah then I got to the point where the labor just wasn’t oh yeah I spent a lot of days cleaning staples off one sheet off camera shelves that’s what’s a monotonous job oh that’s terrible that’s it but at the time that’s a tweakers job yourself that that’s a new question yeah I know will you make more money yes yeah what good way you made a few extra bucks what’s it worth it they’re like you know I’ll just create it oh yeah you’re going to

do might as well take staples out of aluminum yeah beaver if this was up when you came last time you know I don’t remember I can’t remember why you brought me over here other than to show me that cop in the wire chopper deal would you even pull your harness not anymore same thing diminishing returns I’m like you know when at first I don’t know if the price was better or whatever we did it you know for the first few crushes after you’d started this and then I was like man I got these guys out here for hours pull and they’re getting you know and some of those harnesses are hard to get out and hard to cut and they’re buried in there I’m like you know this it gives the point where I’m just like that pretty good at ten pounds of wire it cost you now it’s not worth a minute you bought you used to sign up for 34 yeah yeah it’s not what say he goes all back to is it worth doing is the juice worth the squeeze right how many guys you got working on this it is

a spa 20 20 around yeah around 20 usually and you’ve been able to keep everybody working through all this government shutdown fortunate all right you’re all considered essential so all this Joe a year ago or so it was under the tent like that iron yard you used to be in there what was yeah we’re just wreath or really he just kept again like we’d have to alter then they don’t wanna oh no kiddin so they want dry oh so that’s why you were trying to keep it undercover yeah when you sell you you basically have they buy it off a percentage of moisture too right so the moisture testing no kid I check the moisture on it it’s like you’re selling hey yesterday he said that’s one of the few aluminum products is actually holding up throughout this is that all the can cheat meals really well because of all this shutdown and nobody is able to do anything but the demand the supply is the supply is diminishing on everything right and then a man’s gonna be going like this going up wall this is shut down so when it opens back up

isn’t it the demand just gonna go crazy and shouldn’t it it depend in theory it’s depends on how fast things start but you got you got you it’s almost like a look because there’s a necessity there’s things they’re out there they’re assess ities that are but they’re gonna have to have and the supply on them has got to be just getting depleted completely right now mm-hmm no we’re trying to tell people that have you know Auto shredders or steel mills or you know whatever like at some point it’s gonna be worth significantly more money just because there is no supply right right right there’s always that there’s always going to be a certain amount of demand for whatever when the supply is diminished the price has got to go up and you don’t hold you don’t two months and expect the demand and not to still be there right right like at some point like your that’s why you see oil price going down the way it’s going down because once you take all the airplanes out of the sky all the trucks off the road all the toys off the road all

everything that’s like big fuel gas oil consumers and you basically almost shut them down or you shut a good majority of them down and then you wonder why the price of oil goes negative yes well that’s unforeseen side effects of this there’s still things that are unforeseen but the oil I mean less than zero dollars a barrel yesterday or whatever and it’s crazy and you know a place to store oil market manipulation and futures contracts and everything else but I think the biggest thing is when they turn this deal back on in my opinion I think you’re hit the nail on the head in my opinion then that demand is going to come back people are gonna want to get back to work they’re gonna want to build it I want a massive manufacturer they got to drive to work they got to drive home they got to go back to trade shows like that is gonna go yeah it’s gotta happen well and at the same time that you know a lot of places haven’t been keeping up they haven’t been this you know they haven’t been supplying so the supply shortage is

gonna be there so they’re gonna have to ramp up a boom boom boom boom all at once you know and get backed up to production levels that they hadn’t been asked so all the materials that they need to do all these you know scrap metal aluminum all these things the demands gotta just snap back up way above what it was before the economy crashing wouldn’t it I would I would I mean in theory is kind of what I’m betting on obviously that’s a lot of rims but yeah Wow it’s just crazy how many rims come in I got something I don’t think like the general public would ever think like that many Rams get recycled you know it doesn’t seem like it but even if the original rims are on it they’re aluminum usually and there’s no demand for him particularly unless they’re really late-model and you know they get in the crash you know and Body Shop goes well I got a you know I got to pay $800 for one from GM or whatever I can buy one from a salvage yard for 200 bucks but that’s super late-model stuff

any of that middle of the roads you know anything that’s ten years old or older the rims are they’re nicked up they’re done you know the looms they’re not worth anything but but what the scrap is nobody wants them which makes you wonder why do they put why do they still put aluminum rims on new vehicles like is it a weight issue it’s a weight issue yeah just to get him under way it’s a weight issue totally cuz fuel mileage yeah hmm makes sense maybe the rims that you don’t ever like we don’t usually recycle if they’re good our rims off bigger bigger pickups that are steel rims for work pickups you know like the mean eight eight eight whole lug rims or ten hole dug rims that are steel dually stuff yeah that stuff always sells used you know oh yeah because that’s production driven but duction driven people people out there making a living with those vehicles yeah it’s a lot different than looks children they give you vision for sure for sure this is our retail area that’s where the general public where the chemicals it comes to sling the recycle

rims you know the rims they couldn’t sell on Craigslist you know they come here you know but like you guys are saying like we get a lot of those calls like how much would you give me for these rooms I’ll just run the you know 20 pounds of ram do the math on it and they’ll usually sell them but they’ll try Craigslist first yeah no one wants to do it yeah but someone wants rims they want them brand new that’s why we recycles so many of ours we just can’t retail a mouth of you know people just don’t buy them because that’s like a luxury yeah yes yes just cuz you bright we sell yeah we do sell a lot of rims like specially wouldn’t like a rim snow tire season people want an extra set of rims to put their snow tires on stuff like that yeah yeah but you know for the most part people just don’t come chip hey I want to put some different aluminum rims on my own so and so or whatever it just not like it use this doesn’t happen very often it’s those customers are rare

this are a commercial scale so like if you had a bin come in full rims the guys weigh it right here okay you know then they fill out the paperwork and matches yours think it goes inside and then get to our Account Manager how much how heavy will that way up to what’s a 10,000 pound platform skills what do you know you a forklifts not gonna pick up 10,000 pounds No so I’ll mine will these these ones one they won’t pick up they’ll pick up like seven you know but really like the sweet spots around five you know like even these all those boxes right here that copper chopper you’ve seen uh-huh those are that’s all copper top they have to cut them in half like that to keep the weight down oh man oh but each one of those like 4,500 pounds yeah really yeah that’s a lot of copper yeah yeah we just shipped a load of that this morning to as much as we can we try and keep the moving is the foreign demand still going on is it yeah the demand is there he’s the

pricing really isn’t the pressure and some of that supply driven like aluminum especially because they’re just not using as much aluminum yeah so right now it’s all your auto manufacturers who your big aluminum users your big secondary aluminum your cats houses or you know those are the guys Melton making the ingots getting them ready for whoever’s making your carburetors your whatever is right your motors or blocks or yes all the cylinder has the cylinder heads all the cast aluminum components those are the give your big your big users and when those guys aren’t running they’re not yeah they’re shut down right now then that demand is is very minimal we’re good thing so I’m good thank you for listening to another episode of recycled Idaho and as we continue the journey across this great state we look forward to bringing you more stories of people and organizations putting in the work to do the right thing yeah it’s a little rustic like this look a little amateur this this white one you got yeah yeah this do I have to wear this it’s time to throw a fit if I have to wear it

I have to work maybe just leave your hat here and then wear your sunglasses Joe let’s see how you look good oh yeah you look like a badass right that’s that’s good right there whatever yeah yeah you