when the publisher of a magazine that you’ve been reading most of your adult life calls and says he’s going to be in town and would like to see your operation you say yes and then you ask him to sit down and do a podcast with you at least that’s what i did i had the privilege of sitting down and bs with jim keith of recycling today magazine a few weeks ago and thoroughly enjoyed our conversation of everything scrap related take a listen all right everybody i was go i got a phone call probably about two months ago and uh jim from recycling today jim keith called and said he was coming into town for a demolition conference a demolition nda board meeting nba board meeting so we’ll get into that here in a minute but you called and we we shot the about scrap recycling your long history and kind of an ancillary part of our business and and being around scrap yards being around recycling facilities ins and outs you’ve probably toured and visited more scrap recycling facilities than most people can shake a stick at so when you called me and told

me you’re gonna come into town and you were gonna carve out a little bit of time for me and i said hell yeah as long as i can call you into doing a podcast so so anyways jim keep recycling today thanks for coming out great to be here i so much appreciate just taking the time and shooting the and just kind of getting some insight from uh it’s been a good day out of the business yeah did a couple yard tours yeah very interesting just kind of walked you through you know our little corner of the world over here in idaho and uh what’d you say you’re telling me earlier you said uh it kind of surprised you how hot it got here yeah you know you you uh forget you think you’re going to idaho it’s going to be you know cooler you’re pretty far north but you’re in the high desert and it was like 100 degrees yesterday and the sun was really hot oh yeah so uh yeah i was listening to the news on my way in this morning and they they and i don’t know if they officially said

it but they said that they they thought we either set a record or we pushed pretty close to someone so you know yesterday that yesterday was was up there on the in the whole grand spectrum that people were starting to get nervous about is it going to get this hot like is this going to be a hot summer yeah you know sure i guess being from the recycling industry you start hearing stuff like that and all the hem hon about you know green technology and global warming and you know depleting ozone all that stuff i don’t know it’s kind of a some of that stuff hits home for me just because i start thinking about how much this stuff’s true how much of it isn’t how much of the role does the recycling industry play in all that’s going on or is it just kind of a that’s the way it goes every 100 years a thousand years you know i don’t know i don’t know i don’t have the answer but i’m curious what your thoughts are yes i’m not a scientist you know any more than you are um i’m reminded of

the old saying that we we don’t inherit the earth from our parents we borrow it from our children yeah right so i mean regardless of exactly where all that is um i think if you think about that it it’s a no-brainer that yeah i mean there are ramifications of the decisions mankind makes to the environment and you also think about the idea that it’s better to conserve right in anything in your life right if you if you should conserve your resources you should conserve what you have and recycling is you know it listen recycling dates back to biblical times and i have a i have a mug in my office that a scrap dealer in in tennessee sent to me and it uh they have this uh saying from fur trade to scrap to steel and there are they were i got this maybe 10 years ago and they were 125 year old company and why because even in those early days of in the united states of settlers working a way across the country right if they threw a horseshoe or broke a tool or whatever they didn’t throw it away they

saved it and when they went to the trading post they turned it in for credit yeah right why because this has value right so you know just the idea that you know conserving and and saving value but you also look at things like you know we’re drinking these you know lacroix out of aluminum cans and you know aluminum more or less there’s an 80 savings in the energy consumption from recycling aluminum versus utilizing virgin aluminum well we all know what energy costs and the strain that delivering energy puts on our society right conserving that seems very basic to me um so i think the recycling industry is pivotal in that i think and i think that the recycling industry is only going to get bigger and and its role is only going to get larger in our society as a the population grows but b i mean in america we’re very heavy consumers we’re very consumer driven economic consumption society um so our ability to you know manage that material flow is what’s going to be you know what’s going to really make us or break us you know from environmental side you know

our ability to manage the excess aluminum cans the pot you know we just we’re talking about plastic water bottles and you brought up a good point it’s the the recycling um of the water bottle the issue isn’t the amount of plastic being generated it’s actually the system of getting it back to its form that it can be recycled and and reproduced into another water bottle yeah i mean that that’s a big that’s a whole big hairy topic but i mean but with just to kind of the cliff notes version is is you know would i rather drink um water out of a an aluminum can absolutely because that’s the industry i’m in right yeah right but it is the is the plastic bottle going away anytime soon i don’t see it going away and just because of the economies of it right the price of bottling um water in an aluminum can versus bottling it in plastic is significantly different so it before we start trying to figure out how to get rid of the plastic bottle i mean we might want to start looking at how do we recycle it better yeah make

it more efficient to recycle it to recover it to get it into the system and now you can make a good decision at that point now okay do we start trying to feather in these other you know products i think one of the big differences that you know so people find out that i’m a publisher in the recycling industry right like you’re at a dinner party you’re at a you know soccer games whatever right and and they ask questions and i ask people you know what do you think the thing that you use like every day in your life probably that’s most recycled and you get answers like oh you know my plastic bottle or newspaper or different things right yeah but the answer really is your car oh yeah why because there’s so much value in an end of life car right and so it gets recycled automatically the trouble with things like plastic bottles is that incrementally the value of that bottle isn’t very great and so there’s less of an incentive to go out and capture every one of them a car is big has lots of ways to you know

extract that value you know at the end of that life yeah the same as we were just walking through your plant and you know turnings that come out of a machine shop or you know even the aluminum cans that were you know you had a bunker full of them ready to meet the baler that stuff has value a lot of the things that can be easily recycled and are great to recycle individually don’t have as much value so the in the system has to be built in a way that that that can be collected and funded and i think what we’re seeing in a movement towards you know communities having a bit of a recycling surcharge so that the companies who are charged with going around and picking that stuff up at people’s house when you calculate the cost of collection versus the cost of the material it’s a negative formula a small fee helps to offset that right so now you can begin to have a circular economy and get that stuff back into the recycling stream to reuse stream um i believe that has to happen what’s your so maybe going into

that question what’s your opinion because i just was kind of discussing this with uh jennifer uh betts from argus media the other day we were talking about my wife and i went to oregon for one of our friends their daughter graduated high school so we went there and we stopped by the store and we bought a case of beer and i was like and my wife’s like geez did you see how much extra they charge us for that beer because organs are redemption yeah we’re not in idaho right deposit state and i think it was like you know 24 times five you know and and i was like and she’s like gosh that’s like a lot i mean she goes if you were to buy that regularly here that’s it kind of adds up eventually and i was like yeah and i said um because oregon’s uh a deposit state yeah and she and because she knew she had never really thought about that um but in our business we think about a lot sure and i was having that conversation with with jennifer i was like you know part of me as much

as i don’t want the government involved in any more of what we do like i’m i’m kind of an anti like hands-off type of individual when it comes to government and their overreach but there is some part of me that says if you made the deposit 50 cents a can like something crazy people would start to figure out how to get the out of the trash right like eventually at some point there’s a tipping point and i don’t know what that tipping point is but it it almost has to be created yeah i mean i don’t you you’ve dealt with enough right there there are pros and cons to those when you get into this whole discussion about you know bottle bills and deposits and so forth you know one of the issues that we have to be respectful of is the fact that if you pull through deposit bills all of the high value recyclables out then and create their own parallel system to the post-consumer recycling chain then you’ve just saddled the companies who we asked to invest millions of dollars of in infrastructure we just robbed them of all

the high-value material or we rob that system of the high value material which helps to mitigate those necessary infrastructure costs right and that’s a problem so you really have to think through that and how’s that going to work the other thing is you know if you look at california they have a deposit state as well and that system has been plagued with problems you know for a long time it doesn’t mean you should jettison it but it but how you manage it is important and i think today we’re seeing a lot more of the consumer brands becoming aware of and pressured to think about the end of life of their packaging right so what’s going to happen to it after and i think that there’s um there’s a balance that the industry’s going to have to work through in terms of setting up a whole bunch of different parallel systems seems terribly illogical and wildly inefficient right but at the same time there should be pressure on consumer packaged goods companies to think about how they package things right if you look at computer companies you know these microphones they come in a

box but it’s a box that has molded pulp packaging instead of styrofoam that’s probably a lot better because molded pulp is a lot easier to recycle styrofoam can be recycled but get you know as with anything we again turning your operations right you we we walked through your chopping plant the other earlier today and it’s very efficient why because you aggregate enough volume from your other yards into that facility getting enough volume of styrofoam into one place yeah it’s really hard right yeah and you know it’s made to be light exactly airy and take up a lot of space with very by little little weight it’s just i mean it’s right kind of and it has to kept segregated in its own material whereas molded pulp can be blended with other stuff you know it can be part of an occ pack so you could be part of a mixed paper pack you can do different things with it at the recycling plant level and so so it’s just there are decisions like that that have to be made things that go into how a package is designed you know when you add layers

to stuff and all of a sudden you’ve taken something like a p-e-t bottle that’s very recyclable but you put a wrap on it that has a foil with it now you just really complicated the science and how do you make all of that work um there has to be more awareness you know we’re both members of a group of israel right and israel does their design for recycling award right that’s a great program because it acknowledges firms that think about end of life for their product and that’s complicated the recycling industry a lot you know companies who don’t think about that and then all of a sudden the recycling industry is now somehow responsible for properly managing something that’s dangerous at the end of its life or hard to recycle or difficult to recycle and then people get upset because there might have to be a fee associated with that yeah well wait a minute the recycling industry didn’t create that issue right we’re just trying to deal with it at the end of the life yeah you’re just i mean you’re just just trying to figure out a way to to

repurpose it reuse it and get it get it back to its original form so it can be used again i mean that’s that’s the and that’s where i think scrap companies have taken you know a lot of heat is that i mean we’re not really viewed as a manufacturing company right because manufacturing kind of has its place in the world you know and you know on the scrap recycling end you’re it’s been viewed for a lot of years as kind of a dumpy you know nasty place that nobody really wants in their backyard and we were just having this conversation a little bit it goes how do you get people motivated to understand or at least maybe not motivate just get to understand the role that the recycling industry plays in their community in their in their state in their country and and and get people on board to wanting those facilities in their town in their city and and you bring up a really good point you said one thing that the recycling the scrap recycling company companies need to work on being better at is showing the value that we’re bringing to

two areas right and and we’re just i mean it’s we are the best marketers all the time right like we’re in this we’re in recycling business not in the necessarily the marketing business but i think we’re starting to realize hey we have to be able to you know communicate you know all the good that we’re also also doing for these areas i think it’s i think this is a a major issue for the industry we’re almost you could argue maybe we’re at an apex moment where we really need to get better about this i would argue that not only particularly in the scrap business not only are we a manufacturing business but we’re a highly sophisticated manufacturing business because the charge you know the job is to manufacture a specification raw material right when you produce a product whether it’s going to steel mill aluminum smelter copper refiner whatever it might be you’ve got a package specification that you’re accountable to as a supplier and yet you need to build that package you need to create that package from a whole bunch of material that’s not specification so you have to clean it up

you have to um get the stuff out the out throws the contaminants separate all of that out get down to the clean package and then deliver it so it’s it that in many ways is a far more sophisticated kind of operation people don’t think about it that way but you know if i’m making many many things i get my inbound docs have a spec material that then i’m making something else from the inbound dock at a scrapyard doesn’t get the beauty of a specification material yeah it gets all the outgrows all the ends all the waste all the done this is over we don’t need it anymore that hits your dock make something from it right yeah when you consider the amount of economic value that um scrapyards deliver in their communities it’s massive it’s not just the jobs that they create and the um taxes that they pay how about the environmental cleanup that they do you know we were talking a few minutes ago about you go to a place beautiful place like hawaii and you see abandoned cars on the side of the road why don’t you see that in other

places because there are scrap companies who help to create a mechanism through which those cars are reclaimed right and they’re recycled and in that island environment it’s harder to do that right so um so that we’ve seen that in in in a lot of communities over over the years and scrap companies also listen they’re buying material from not only commercial and industrial generators whether it’s a machine shop or an automobile manufacturer or local plumber or electrician but they’re also buying from peddlers peddlers sometimes you know truth is sometimes some underprivileged parts of society who rely on that income as a staple for them to be able to maintain any kind of life and the scrap industry gets zero credit for that they should get credit for that yeah one of the mentalities that i have fought against and you and i chatted about this on the phone a little bit is is there’s an old you know there’s an old mentality in the scrap industry we want to fly under the radar right the industry’s got to get away from that they got to get away from it companies have to engage their communities

and they have to share with them really what they’re doing you know um get folks get your local councilmen get your congressmen get your you know whatever they are local politicians local in leaders and civic leaders chambers of commerce people that are like involved open up your yard bring them in show them what you do share with them what comes in but then also vitally important what goes out yeah and how it happens you know the industry fought this massive battle you know years ago we talked this morning about you know pull apart yards and you know auto dismantling it’s kind of related the scrap is not the same but all of a sudden mercury switches well the automotive dealers put it in so that when you pop your trunk the light comes on right super convenient really great right now the scrap guy oh you’re an emitter of mercury right we all know mercury is dangerous right why is that the scrap guys liability right they’re actually the ones working to clean it up to manage it at the end of its life right communities um need to understand that we as an

industry need to do a better job of sharing the value of what we what we do right i mean if you look at if you look at aluminum recycling said earlier you know 80 energy savings right how many more power plants would we need in this country if we didn’t recycle all the aluminum that we could i did a little article on linkedin on yesterday they talked about new steel manufacturing for windmills and like you guys want to build all these windmills and solar panels by 2050 to decarbon decarbon the the world i’m like do you understand like you physically understand how much steel that’s going to take they said you could recycle every pound of of scrap steel available that means nothing hits the landfill and you still need a crazy amount of iron ore to get that done right and that’s if every single pound of manufactured steel that was going to get recycled actually gets recycled and doesn’t touch the landfill it’s an amazing amount of material that’s going to have to be i mean it’s that’s gonna have to be found processed sorted um you know melted into new steel

just to scratch the surface exactly and so many metals are you know they’re i say so many all of them essentially are infinitely recyclable yeah right you can plastic’s not that way you can recycle plastic and particularly if it’s clean and so forth but it’s not infinitely recyclable right because it continues to lose performance characteristics as it’s recycled even paper has that element to it where it reduces some performance characteristics metals aren’t that way when you recycle steel and make new steel you have steel yeah right you basically are taking the contaminants back out of it and you’re creating that slag or whatever else and you’re keeping the original form right and then re right remake and so back to like what does it provide the community well it keeps it clean it you know the jobs the taxes but also like when you walk outside and you can breathe and you have clean air and you know all the stuff that goes along with it that’s just kind of you know it’s tremendous it’s a it keeps material out of a landfill yep so i want to switch topics on you a little

bit give me a little bit of a background just because i you know on recycling today yourself and kind of how you got to you and i discussed earlier just give me a little bit of background on you and what you do and how you ended up at recycling today and and then then at the end or not the end but then after that i kind of wanted you to give me like what recycling today’s you know role is in the scrap industry so recycling today goes back to 1963 it was actually founded as secondary raw materials magazine and in 1968 the sort of beginning of the environmental movements in this country the name was changed to recycling today in the mid 80s our company gie media acquired recycling today and a newsletter called fiber market news and paper stock directory and then we began to to build the business from there as a as a you know a professional media company and you know we think that our role in the industry is to help to facilitate discussion it’s to help share and disseminate business intelligence market information across the industry and as

a media company today we’re active in oh more or less 20 different industries everything from aerospace manufacturing and pest control to golf course management scrap metal and the waste industry and in all of our markets we really believe that there is a role to be played to facilitate discussion and to uh to help serve the industry by sharing information sharing business intelligence and um and also connecting people connecting people across the industry we believe that’s part of the role of media in in all the markets that we serve and so we we not only publish in recycling today but we publish construction and demolition recycling which serves the demolition industry and the and the um mixed cnd recycling space you know we talked about this earlier we got into that because it the relation to the scrap business because we cover paper recycling paper recycling led to post-consumer recycling as the industry’s evolved and that it now encompasses plastics recycling then of course end-of-life electronics we talked about the fact that my son’s not working in that in that business and um that’s become a big and important part of the

of the industry and you talk about the benefits to society you know the reality is that the smartphones and the computers and all this tech that everybody relies on also has a lot of you know dangerous constituencies materials within them if they weren’t recycled that stuff could be very harmful to the environment recycling is really really important for those materials and then we also uh we also publish waste today and more for the garbage business and post-consumer recycling market i joined the business in 1991 and um and worked my way up through the business to eventually become publisher and you know it’s a this is an industry that kind of gets into your blood i’ve been fortunate to have a lot of fun doing it that’s what i was going to say when you and i originally talked on the phone when you said you were coming into town for for your for your board meeting um i could and i had never talked to you on the phone before that you know i didn’t know you from adam and but one thing i’m i’m passionate about is the scrap industry right um

and i can just tell by talking to you that you were passionate about the industry so i’m like oh this is a guy i could spend some time with shooting the right like fascinating business yeah i’m like i’m i’m willing to do it you know this is interesting to me you know because to hear somebody else’s perspective it’s not necessarily a scrap yard operator owner you know equipment manufacturer or whatever like it’s just a different take on our industry but i could tell that you had a passion for it and was it what kind of what got it kicked off in your eyes like when you started in 91 like what what kind of did it just grow on you or did it was it was just something you saw like hey there’s a lot of potential there what what got you to that point i think it it grew on me you know you you get into the business you start meeting you know like anything in life you start meeting the people and you realize that it’s not just the scrap industry but recycling as a whole i would argue it’s very

fraternal i mean you get to meet a lot of people you um you create relationships friendships you learn how deep the business is it’s a fascinating global industry and it’s also rapidly evolving continuously changing i mean if you look today at the equipment that’s used it it’s amazing how much it’s advanced you know even in the almost 30 years that i’ve been in the business it’s it’s incredible and so if you’re willing to embrace it there’s there’s always more to learn there’s yeah always more to see but i also love the fact that it is a relationship business relationships matter um commitments matter handshake people care about you know others that they know in the business and you know you build a lot of friendships and and i think that part of it is also there’s a lot of industries you can be there’s ac industries we’re active in as a company well that just doesn’t exist it’s much more corporate it there’s not as much of the deep relationships that that form in this industry so i think that the combination of the fact that it’s an evolving fascinating industry with a lot

of depth to it you know understanding what goes on with non-ferrous recycling how different that is from ferrous recycling but then understanding how different that is from paper recycling and that white grades is different than occ and it’s just there’s a you know it’s just an industry with a lot of depth to it and a lot of a lot of uh potential like and i think that’s kind of what when i think about it and like the probably the drum beat i probably beat the the hardest and the loudest is you know this isn’t a dying industry like this industry to me reminds me of like a tech industry and the fact that we’re just getting started right like we’re like just scratch this is like internet 2000 you know like this is we’re we’re just scratching the surface on what’s about to be possible from a recycling green technology all the stuff i mean where anybody that would be interested in like trying to decide you know what what they want to be in the future right whether you want to be you know a scientist or you want to be an

equipment operator or i mean there’s so an engineer an engineer there’s materials facets to our business that i’m like if you’re looking for like the future of the world that we’re living in it’s a consumption driven world you know the two biggest economies in the world i mean you’re watching china slowly become a consumption driven economy absolutely very much in manufacturing and look what’s happened to their domestic recycling business just in the last couple of years yeah and you had mentioned something earlier today i’ll come back to it about china but um my thing is is this is a growing this is a growth driven industry i think there was some time period where people just thought it was just kind of a old school kind of a and i’m like you guys did you peek underneath the hood a little bit you’re about to see and regardless of what administration is in office i don’t like to play the politic game just because i i don’t i don’t enjoy it i don’t you know i’m gonna do what i’m gonna do to the best i can with the when you know given the

parameters i have to work in like i’m not gonna whoever’s the president is the president and vice versa like i’m just gonna do the best i can with what i got absolutely um so regardless of who’s in office you’re seeing the trend i mean and not just from the us but i mean globally people are trying to figure these challenges out and they’re trying to figure them out together in a lot of in a lot of respects because our industry is very um global i mean we’re buying selling trading moving i mean trash is what one of the biggest global trade businesses that the us has right from an outbound scrap from an export standpoint right absolutely yeah i mean we’re we’re exporting that and that kind of sometimes i think catches people off guard yeah you know the volume of material prepared commodities we’re not exporting trash we’re exporting there was a long period of time when we were exporting trash true and before all the murph started coming up on board and there was and that was a big that was a big thing that the u.s was trying to get

away from was being a trash exporter and i think we’ve done we’ve we’ve made leaps and bounds you know in progress in the last say 15 years how much more like is going to what’s going to happen 15 years from now i think it’s going to blow people’s minds right it’s going to we were talking this morning in the car about electric vehicles and what what’s impact that’s going to have the the recycling industry is as old as it is it goes back to biblical times right yeah as old as it is it’s brand new yeah because it’s constantly evolving you know material science changes how you can recover classify materials continuously evolving the machinery that you can use the it’s just it is a people don’t think of it this way but it is a technology techno technologically driven business it truly truly is and it will continue to be that way you know i think that that is only going to become more advanced in the future and it because people are going to put resources behind it and that’s i always say if you want to know where the future is

look where the big resources are going right i mean look where the big boys are stepping and follow their footsteps because and that’s where you follow the money essentially where they’re putting their money are they are they putting it into coal-fired plants are they putting in a green technology right well the only way you get there is through recycling one facet or another right um and because how can you have a green technology if you haven’t thought about what happens at end of life and that’s what that whole article was about on you know on the new steel on steel industry was how can you feel good about building green technology windmills bases all the components plus all these solar panels and all this stuff if it’s still being made at a coal-fired or you know still being powered it’s gonna be powered and then or using you know versus like say a like a traditional you know blast furnace versus a you know i mean just all those technologies play a role in creating a truly green technology we keep talking about you know there’s a lot of talk today in

um in the world about electric vehicles right well guess what every charging station needs copper yeah the transmission wires to get there need copper the average vehicle requires three to four times the amount of copper that a combustion you know car requires requires so so copper is infinitely recyclable has great values and the scrap industry is the industry that makes that possible right kicking all that copper back into the supply chain at the end of its life and so the this industry is really going to be pivotal to making green technology happen to to realizing the potential of it i i always i feel like the uh people ask me all the time you know about our business our specific business and how we’ve been able to grow it and i said i kind of got lucky um in when i started an 04 it was a time when recycling was kind of becoming cool as far as it was green and that you know 04 to 08 you know it was it was green and we were um you know recycling was was was becoming more pushed to the forefront of how we’re

going to move everything forward and there was money to be made and all the way into like oh wait at least on the scrap side right um into 08 the economy tanked and the price of commodities went down you know pretty you know aggressively but i was that short little window i was able to recruit a bunch of you know smart people into our business which enabled us to grow our business right so then if i like take that and project it across the whole industry it’s like how do we grow and how do we how do we build a strong industry or strengthen it and grow it it’s our ability to to get young smart people into the industry right so so critical so i think about it you know on my little mini scale of the world over here and how do i you know project that out like what is going to be my contribution to the industry um and it’s hopefully getting younger generations to think like this is a this is a industry that’s got a lot of potential right sure and how do how do we get those

those young minds into our industries young equipment operators into our industry that all these people into our industry that can play such a vital role the engineers the i mean you name it right they can they can just push it along and really explode it and that goes back to you know why does the industry need to get out of this mindset of flying under the radar yeah right and you ask me why would the podcast like because i like what i do right you guys are doing a podcast too like you’re trying to expose all the goodness that’s going exactly take an industry that is has operated in the shadows and is widely misunderstood and add some more visibility to it add some more transparency to it so that young people start thinking about the fact that there may be a future for me in the recycling industry that may be a really interesting you know opportunity um i shared with you that my you know my son’s in the business today and and i think that that’s fantastic but he only had visibility on it because of what i do for a

living right he he wouldn’t have known necessarily and i think that we we have that’s just another reason we as an industry have to do a better job of getting out there tell the story yeah right it’s it’s this is a it’s an old industry that’s constantly being reborn constantly being reborn and we talked a lot today about how your dad did business versus how you did business do business and how everything’s changed and you know yeah it’s still scrap business but it’s not the same and that’s the same for every company and it’s true in india as it’s true in the middle east as it’s true in china or here in north america or europe we have to do a better job as an industry about communicating what we are and what our value is because that human capital that you need everyone struggles today with attracting you know qualified workers whether that’s a crane operator a metal sorter or an engineer to help design a processing system right how do we attract those people we have to create an industry an awareness of the industry so that they’re interested in it yeah

right and there’s a lot of work to be done in this arena so i so how do you think i mean in your opinion and i i asked jennifer this the other day too i said how do you what do you think what how how do we do that how do we you know as an industry you know generate that you know interest peak the young minds you know the up and comers you know the real the real smart people out there that are you know going to change this and and add value and bring new technology how do we get them in i think there’s you know obviously i don’t have all the answers there’s a lot of things that we could do again that community engagement some companies have done that extremely well more companies need to embrace that they’ve got to embrace it i was also involved um again through israel we’ve been very involved the big supporter of the association but they collaborated with the jason project to create school age curriculum to teach recycling and it was built in the framework of science stem right and it gave went

all the way to the level of giving teachers lesson plans that they could deploy in their classroom right it met stem requirements but it is built on and you can go from elementary school all the way through high school right not enough companies have taken that to their local school districts where they’re active where they have kids in school and said oh did you know that there’s this really cool project that we can deliver to you curriculum specific assignments that you can work on with the kids we need to promote it and it you know people say well what’s israeli doing to promote that well it really comes down to to the companies in the industry to take that to their because listen all life there’s an old saying all scrap is local right all politics is local scrap is local it’s got to happen at the local level right it has to happen at the local level i think that that that program could do a wealth of good what about stepping out of your comfort zone and getting involved in local community colleges or universities we’re at boise you’ve got um idaho

state university right here right you could go in and speak good makes sense and lift the veil lift the veil um i did a speech at the local or the locals they do a statewide uh landfill association meeting and and just the landfills because they’re fighting different battles that we are right and just explain landfills what we’re doing because then they’re out there projecting what they’re doing for the community and what the value and the service they’re providing i did one for the college of idaho um which is a college right in our backyard there in caldwell i did the same thing discuss the trash business the waste business the scrap business which are three very different industries you know people get them confused waste trash and and scrap commodities right they try and blend them on occasion but the reality of it is it’s very different totally different it’s very different and explain them the difference you know but trying to do my part but there’s more i can do and i think that’s one of the reasons why i’m i’d want to do this podcast but i think what you do with

this podcast is another great thing you know what we talked earlier about john sacco and what john’s done with pile of scrap you know creating awareness you know when he’s out there he’s talking about the industry he’s sharing you know the realities and the value of what the industry is it’s a great thing and i think that each each area each each state each you know could have their own representative you know even if it’s just one per state for a while like one company to say i’m going to take on oregon and i’m going to i’m going to talk about you know just what our company is doing in the state of oregon for the in the recycling industry right and i think that there’s something there that somebody just has to take the ball because then everybody else starts to get on board right yeah i didn’t do my podcast until sako convinced me to be on his right i wasn’t i didn’t really want to be on video i didn’t want to be on you know i i didn’t really like listening to myself talk or on camera or whatever but

eventually i just got over it and said it i’m gonna do it and i was happy i did it because it’s enabling me to connect and it’s enabled it’s it’s it’s brought a lot of value to what i’m doing and and and i can’t think i’ve thanked him enough i thanked him i thank him every time i buy a piece of equipment from him but don’t think him too much right yeah exactly but uh but i mean he he kind of motivated me to do it right and so my only thing is if a guy like me who didn’t even want to sit down can find a way to do it then i think there’s a lot of there’s a lot of you know companies out there that can find somebody to kind of get there and start at least start the that that process start you know so you mentioned our new podcast the scrap show that that brian taylor’s hosting now and and just did an interview with becky broller and michael friedman were the first two ones but we megan smalley who’s uh a younger member of our team um does

a podcast called fresh perspective i’ve i’ve listened to hers because she had my buddy uh jake bronstein on there yeah so fantastic so megan’s done a amazing job of of helping young people young folks who have joined the industry share some of how do they get into it why are they in it what what have they learned what are they doing what’s it about and hopefully that’s also something that other young folks who might be thinking about this industry they could go in and listen to some of those and and say wow like these people are doing cool stuff yeah you know so we we’ve supported that because we think it’s so important you know for the future of the industry i think a lot of companies need to get more open to supporting you know their their team getting involved in their community we’ve had um members of our team you know we’ve guests lectured at community groups we’ve just lectured at universities we’ve guest lectured for um different schools um and i just think that more in the industry need to think about how they can do that and and make listen

you could talk about it all day long yeah but at some point you got to get off the diamond and do it and i’ll tell you what like that just from uh from a guy who’s who’s doing it every day there’s value in it for your business too and i think i think hopefully i can get maybe some people motivated to do it if i tell them like you can actually see value on the back end of your business so not only are you getting the front end exposure positive exposure for the industry but you’re also you’ll get value from it as being the local state-wide whatever recycling company that’s out there doing the right thing and so it’s it’s economically worth both ways and i i mean it’s so true i don’t i don’t do it just for the hell i don’t do it because i’m bored i mean i i i do it for everybody you have too much going on you get bored yeah so i stay busy right but i do it because i see benefit on multiple fronts or else i wouldn’t do it that’s just the way

it is and i i’m hopefully meetings like this we can sit down and shoot the and i can we can convince people like hey do it like promote the industry like we’re out we’re doing a lot of good stuff like promote it be proud of it you know you know we’ve hosted jordan i obviously as a media company our business a little bit different but we’ve hosted and toured high school groups we recently hired this really great young man who’s joined our team as a journalist he we didn’t know this till the interview process he toured through our offices when he was in high school like wow you know yeah that’s cool and was fascinated by the company right so you know there’s a lot of benefits that accrue to your business if you’re willing to be a bit more open and share your story yeah so scrap industries got to get more open about we do and i agree with that if there’s a takeaway from this podcast i mean and you’re the one that opened my eyes to it like i never really thought about why i was doing the podcast you

asked me originally and i thought because i like the industry i love i love what i do the relationships and i just love interviewing people that like that got hustle and that are like like you know builders they’re doers you know because i think our industry is built on builders and viewers and like grinders and you know we go through crazy commodity cycles you know the big swings the crazy downs where you’re you know you’re scratching and it’s it’s not a steady business whatsoever you know right um and that’s another cool element of the business to share is the is the genuinely entrepreneurial nature of the business yeah um and you know what you could be in like in your case a third generation company but still if you’re not entrepreneurially driven you’re gonna be in trouble because because of the way that it changes so quick i mean you know not just building fence posts here right like defense poses a fence post defense post well as the years go by and things change in the recycling industry if you’re not willing to adapt and when to change willing to grow and willing

to take it to the next level whatever that is then you’re going to get passed too you know and one of the things that prompted me to call you was the the um podcast you and sean davidson did yeah and you know davis index and and sean was largely you were talking about a lot of the other things with the pricing and how they build their methodologies and all that kind of stuff a lot of just scrap and history but you guys also began to hit on this you know the scrap industries got to get out in front of their communities more right it was kind of at the end and it prompted me to pick up the phone and call you and say man that point that you made at the end like that is a point that’s got to be driven home um and that’s where we started talking so i’ll last question and then we’ll go uh eat a bite for lunch how have you seen you’ve been doing this you know you’ve kind of been on the outside you know and the i call it the peripheral you you get

like the best vantage point you see multiple yards in multiple countries and just see things evolve in the industry what’s the biggest you know take away the biggest thing you’ve seen in our industry from 91 when you kind of started with your current you know where you’re at now and just what have you seen that’s either impressed you the most or this just kind of been mind-boggling over the last 30 years in the recycling one thing that’s that’s amazed me is is in my early days in the business a lot of the machinery and equipment that was used was modified from other industries it came from some bulk handling market or from from coal or from minerals processing and it was modified to be used in this market today it’s staggering the range of technology of equipment that is purpose built for scrap processing you know if you look at the way automobile shredders and all of the downstream processing is has evolved you know the the sgm magnetics of the world or steinert’s and and others like them you know sgm just built uh in in long island your well kershaw recycling

built an amazing zorba plant right um that the level of technology is just unbelievable absolutely unbelievable that’s been an amazing evolution and change um the other the other thing i would say is is materials you know because the materials have just evolved so much over over that period and and the and another thing i would mention is and i don’t want anyone to take the wrong but the professionalism of the industry listen it’s still people go to work in jeans and t-shirts right um i go to work in gene’s t-shirts every day too and i i prefer it that way right um but even in that environment the industry’s become a lot more professional a lot more sophisticated because it has to be it’s you know again people don’t this is a global trading industry whether the scrap the price of scrap in detroit or dusseldorf or boise right it is absolutely dictated by global markets and you know that has changed too because it didn’t used to be quite as driven in that way as it is today so i think you know technology materials and the global nature of the

business i agree with you just changed both of those points and i’ve and i’ve seen even on the pricing side you know it used to be a set it and forget it at the beginning of the month deal you know and then it was you just went about your business and that whole dynamic and you know i mean so much more transparency it’s became as much of a commodities trading business so all you robin hood stock traders out there like this is another industry that is built for people like in the on the trading side you know absolutely there’s a whole other component to it sure thank you thank you great to be here with you today yeah and that’s being boise and let the let the the team over there your guys decide they’re doing the podcast there’s listeners out there i’m listening to them and i enjoy them and uh keep going keep pushing great thanks brett great to be here with you appreciate it