welcome to bets on the future where we highlight the various career paths in the electrifying Metals World from the vehicle you ride in to the bridge holding it up metals are everywhere why not in your career too I’m Jennifer Betts a medals industry veteran with almost 20 years experience here to highlight these incredible career paths As Told by the women who are living them on this week’s episode of bets on the future we have really an incredible guest because she comes from the sustainability World which you would think more Metals Recycling individuals would be a part of and yet we’re going to get into maybe why or why not more of us aren’t on that sustainability track or maybe we’re going to be recruiting more and more of those individuals like Maddie Carlson the sustainability consultant at Shapiro Maddie is a sustainability consultant at Shapiro where she applies her degrees in economics and Environmental Studies from eard college to evaluate sustainability programs for her clients using data case studies and efficiency evaluations she also writes a Blog called sustainability insights in a column called beyond the bin both addressing personal and professional environmental issues

Maddie is motivated and grateful to have the opportunity to collaborate with others to create a positive imp impact on the environment and Society so I want to give a huge welcome to Maddie so thank you so much for coming on to the program today I’m very curious to hear about your background because we don’t always meet sustainability consultants in the metals industry although personally I think we should uh because we I’m a little biased but I think we do some great work here so I wanna I want to know like how how did you how did you get in into this world yeah well first of all thank you so much for having me I’m really excited to get to talk to you you know you have so much background and knowledge and experience in this industry I just looking forward to diving into some of the topics so I didn’t always have my heart set on the recycling sustainab or the recycling industry I always knew from a young kid I wanted to be in the environmental field in some way I was a big National Geographic kid spent as much time as

I could outdoors and would get you know frustrated seeing people litter and try and think of ways that you know we could do something better so that led me to my college choice of AC College they’re just a big environmental School big environmental culture every student has to take an environmental course which I think should be at every College um or every school just to you know get get more education um not just about recycling but about any environmental topic out there and at first I felt quite overwhelmed about which sector of environmentalism do I want to go into because I just looked around and you know see everything that needed help you know from sustainable Fisheries to Water Management Forest management microplastics pollution biodiversity I mean Pi pick a topic and probably some part of it needs some help environmentally and at the time I found my place in in the recycling industry kind of on accident it was just what fit was the best fit for me at the time and I was able to really apply what I could what I learned at College through my economics and environmental doing economic

case studies about sustainable topics um so I just kind of took it from there kept gaining more experience especially on the plastic side and kind of hope to continue that I love that your sustainability background specifically your degree combined it with economics because I think a lot of individuals think about sustainability as maybe just a buzzword and that you were applying it from a business mindset of okay how do we actually make the financial aspect of this Mak sense is that something that’s always been you know from the business end a part of yeah yeah I always knew I wanted to have an environmental degree and something else I didn’t know what that was going to be until I got to college you know I I played around with a journalism class I took a accounting class um just kind of finding my place and ended up having a really influential Professor uh Frank Hamilton he’s he taught me a lot and you know something he said was I could make a room cry about about all of these really um you know sad environmental stories you know show you pictures of polar be

Bears starving on the ice caps but unfortunately a lot of people aren’t going to Care unless it affects their pocket uh and I you know really just was interested in the classes um I love the number side of things and combining the two the economics and the environmental I just found like that was the avenue to get the most progress done done and I think that they fit better together than most people think that they would agreed there was a article recently talking about why we don’t see the polar rares in photos on those floating um pieces of ice anymore and it’s specifically about what your professor was talking about is that they did studies on the lack of effects essentially that it had on individuals that it wasn’t really having the impact that the scientist really wanted on individuals that it needed to your point to have more of an economic impact where people needed that Financial incentive not necessarily something from unfortunately the the heart aspect and I you you wish that that would be enough to have people change or you know look into something more look into their environmental practices

but I think it’s also just kind of the amount of exposure it had especially at first first and you know what people would just see it all the times each time that they saw it the effectiveness went down and it kind of lost its you know meaning if you just are so exposed to pictures or stories like that so yes well one thing our industry does that uh we haven’t really exposed people to is the images the photos the things that we do right so as you’ve gotten into this industry you know the the metal side of things has it surprised you to see what we what we do in terms of the the metals manufacturing the the Metals Recycling aspect yes I think the recycling industry of any material um but I I think Metals especially learning that this it’s this giant Commodities Market that no one really knows about unless you’re in it and you know I work with manufacturers and even just getting to see how different products are made is extremely interesting and I think that there’s a large disconnect of a lot of things whether it’s between our food

or our products or how where things end up like the landfill or the recycling center there’s just there’s this whole other world that a lot of people don’t know of and it’s been really cool to learn about it and to help improve it and contribute to it I wasn’t aware that after you took the aluminum can and you put it in the recycling bin that that there was this whole other commodity trading world that it went through essentially to then be melted down into a new can ultimately going back onto the store shelf within 60 days I I don’t know I just thought it magically poof went into another can went into something else and it’s been really eye opening over the years to see what it can become and maybe it doesn’t become a can again maybe it become something else um maybe part of my car is you know an old aluminum can in some regards yeah I think another thing that was surprising to for me was the different language that is surrounding especially metal recycling I am still learning new terms every day of you know a a different term

for copper punching that some people in part of the country use or you know you have fluff that comes out of a shredder you know that’s the waist part the plastic part I mean it’s just they have this whole list of different terms that it it still surprises me and I think we continue I don’t think I’ll ever be able to memorize all of them uh so that that was something too that was a bit of a culture shock coming in and learning about all the different names for the really specific types of not only metal but the form that they come in yes and for those that are listening this podcast does span the full metal supply chain so some individuals that are on more of the OEM side of things the Shredder the automobile Shredder does essentially separate the the vehicle or other metallics that are essentially combined together into smaller pieces and if there are non-metallics in there very much glossing over a lot of parts here but the non-metallics that come out of the Shredder yes are deemed fluff and they have a variety of names sometimes and

uh it’s a very interesting byproduct that you see and there are actually companies now that are going back through and seeing if there are ways to either use that material e either as landfill cover or being able to use it as energy and incinerators or other opportunities so that it’s not essentially waste that that material can be used so the shredders can be essentially 100% recycled materials coming out of or usable I should say materials coming out of there yeah the shredder is great for those for those pieces that you can’t manually disassemble to recycle each different metal component in there and I think that it’s great there’s there’s working on Innovations to take care of even the fluff so even a higher percentage is is reused for those who may not understand the term sustainability consultant or may not be aware of what Shapiro is or does can you give kind of a a broad example of of what Shapiro does and then uh give a an example or a broad coverage of what you do as a sustainability consultant yeah absolutely so Shapiro is a 120 year old company started off as

just a normal scrap company dealing with mostly metals and we have just continued to expand our different materials and in the last couple years focused on including nonmetals as well so plastic wood cardboard paper and additionally you know using as as many equipment as as much as I’ll say I’ll rephrase that part um I’ll say you know also adding in equipment where needed to make the process as efficient as possible by reducing the transportation needed because that’s additional CO2 that we want to avoid and so everything that we do is post manufacturing but pre-consumer so after a product is uh already getting put together assembled the parts of that that are extra excess material or maybe things that didn’t come out right didn’t pass the Quality Inspection or things that we recycle so things that don’t hit the market or maybe there are some in intellectual property that they’re testing a new product and it they’re just going through the engineering phase seeing if it works and it’s not going to Market but it is you know in the testing phase and then scrap once they figure out a new way or want

to make a more official product and uh we work from anywhere from a a pontoon boat to a large shipping container we do um I mean I I you could probably name a manufacturing industry and we’ll probably have a client or two in it yeah that’s uh a very wide range and again why I said it’s really interesting getting to see a lot of different products being made and so we we help out um with the total recycling programs um and also if you know we think that something should be uh we also do a lot of unique material research so right now I’m trying to find a home for carbon fiber there’s some cool Innovation coming out there but it’s not super accessible to everyone and at least for when it comes we’ll be ready for it because a lot of places right now it’s just unfortunately being L filled which you have to C actually cure it before so it takes a lot of energy to cure it and then being sent to the landfill so it’s just kind of it it’s even worse um you know compared to some other uh

materials so just finding unique homes for places is what we try and and do and uh one of our mottos is find and fix the hard stuff so while this wasn’t a big project another one that we did was they have wooden wheels that Co metal coils were wrapped on and we ended up donating them to the local Zoo for their goat enclosure and because those goats are loving to just they love to hop from high places and you know have a jungle gym so kind of thinking out the box where we can um and another part that uh I’ve helped add to in what we’re building on is also just tracking emissions through it we have a web portal that tracks every pickup every material the commodity price the formula that we put it on but then also the CO2 emissions for the transportation side of it so we’re looking at what their payload is how you know making sure that it’s as high as possible what an increase would look like in CO2 reduction and um giving them an efficiency score so you know if if their production increases you know their

scrap is going to increase and that might not necessarily be a bad thing if their you know scrap per Transportation or per unit is better so that’s what we’re looking for is is that growth still under a level of you know making sure that it’s transport transported in the best most efficient way which is also the most sustainable that’s pretty interesting because I was actually talking to one of your colleagues the other day and they were discussing about some of the industries that you go into and in some of the businesses that I’ve dealt with it’s typically Metals manufacturers or it’s um manufacturers that obviously have products that have metal in them right but that’s not necessarily the case for y’all like they referenced essentially you know a large National company that would come to you and possibly be a client of yours like that that that could be like a potential client of yours and it’s very fascinating the opportunities that you’re providing them because of your knowledge in the recycling world based on what you just shared you’ve got a lot of knowledge and experience and I’m kind of curious when you

were going through your sustainability classes um the environmental classes were there are a lot of discussions around the metals manufacturing aspect of things and I and I asked that because of the carbon footprint for instance like steel has such a large percentage wise on a global scale like it’s around like 8 to n% and has such a relative impact right versus does it get as much air time in terms of what can we do to reduce that you know I learning more about it in my professional career I’m surprised it wasn’t a larger Topic in my studies part of that is you know when we are in upper level courses a lot of them are project or research based and if you didn’t you know you could choose uh the steel steel industry for example as a topic um that’s not one that I did and um so I think part of that is just the structure of the the courses and what you choose to pursue or research um but I don’t think think that it was was enough a lot of it had to do with um you know trade and international

trade because you know the metals go all over the world or materials in general are manufactured and shipped all over the world and so that was always a a piece of the puzzle that we looked but we we had such a holistic view on all sustainability and environmentalism that it was it was definitely a part of it and the recycling in general but the intricacies of the metals Market was not something that was a heavy focus and something I really learned a lot more at chapiro specifically about you know the pricing which I’m still learning a lot of and how you know that changes and you know how how the rest of the world in economics contributes to it and it’s just like I mentioned earlier it’s just something that not a lot of people know is existing and it’s just going around going on in the background of everything that we do it’s it’s pretty fascinating I always like to recommend the book the world for sale by Javier bias and I apologize to his co-writer I always forget his uh his co-author uh his name but um the world for

sale is always a very interesting book because it’s been basically like James Bond meets International commodity Trader but it talks about essentially the commodity market and what goes on behind the scenes to essentially move oil to move metals to move grains to move a lot of those things and how those markets essentially developed from like the 20s 30s and 40s and how we get a lot of our large trading houses today and that it still goes on today and most people are just none the wiser to to what goes on behind the scenes um and that kind of lends into what we’ve been seeing with you know some of some of them is I’ll be allegedly you know for the lawyers out there um what we’ve seen was a little bit of the greenwashing um of of what’s happening out there where maybe they buy a you know one recycling company to offset maybe all the mining companies that they own for instance you know from the environmental horses to your career in sustainability before you came to Shapiro I have to imagine greenwashing has been pun intended a Hot Topic in that world

yeah yeah absolutely I think that I I would love to see someone else’s perspective on this sometimes because to me I can spot it very easily but I forget often that this is my job this is what I’ve studied this is my passion and not everyone is like that and I think that it’s a really big concern and something that I think there’s actually a new category coming out that is newer to me I you know there’s the the top tier one that is the traditional definition of greenwashing you know a company saying that this is made out of 100% recycled material or it is 100% recyclable oftentimes it’s not they just say that um and you know or or saying you know we um we saved you know 280 four tons of CO2 this year by doing this thing and that’s just not actually sure they don’t have the numbers to back it up um and they don’t site their sources they don’t give a background of how they’ve come to these numbers so that’s kind of the traditional green washing and then I I categorize the next one as marketing green washing

so where you use the colors green and blue and you use Hot Topic words like eco-friendly environmentally friendly you know toxic free terms that aren’t these terms aren’t regulated you can put that on anything that you would like you could put that on a plastic water bottle full of lead if you wanted to um there is nothing that’s stopping you well and you know the solution for some of that mostly the top tier is uh is legal restrictions saying hey if you lie about your environmental impact there is going to be fines through this um that only goes so far because you can’t put a legal restriction on a color like green um so some of that is just going to be having to educate the public a little bit more of what does it actually mean to be eco-friendly and kind of a avoid those products that are you know using it as a just a key term but a new one that I have been coming across more often and I don’t quite have I’ll say like a term for it yet but I’ll just say that they’re not giving

the full story on their environmental impact and I think some of it is not on purpose um sometimes it is just their job or something that they an aspect that they didn’t know about maybe they didn’t come from a environmental background and they were given some EHS tasks um to fill that role and you know sometimes it’s you’re you’re Gathering the environmental data and the a marketing team only chooses a couple pretty numbers to present and um some of them is a little bit closer to the tier one of you know kind of purposely omitting details like saying oh we recycled 100 tons this past year and that’s very branded you know on a website but then what’s not included is the number of tons they sent to the landfill or the percentage that they recycled rather than just the hard number of they recycle because if that sounds great until you see the number that they actually sent 500 t to the landfill or they you know have a toxin free product but it’s shipped from all over the world and you know the emissions with that you know correlated with that is

just astronomical so it is a little bit of a foggier definition of greenwashing and you know you know are guilty or not guilty is what I’ve been saying um in a couple of conversations recently and it’s it’s not all bad intentions it’s really not but you know it’s still some of them is having the same impact of not giving the full story and some of it is people just truly building their environmental program and they don’t have the data for every single environmental piece um but you know a lot of times on the other hand it is this isn’t a very good look for us um we’re not going to present this number and you know soon a lot more companies will have to through regulations have to report those numbers but it’s not going to be the case for everyone and you know kind of at the end of the day we can’t necessarily rely on regulations to guide us through this we’re already behind compared to Europe and you know there’s going to be a time too that people need to kind of step up and do the right thing and say

hey this isn’t a great number our energy uses is kind off the charts but at least we know and we’re working on it and this is our full you know our full sustainability report I do have to give a brief shout out to the I’ll say the North American Metals manufacturing Market um from a global perspective because I’ve had these conversations about how in our Market there are some people especially from the I’ll say scrap world because there’s been some rebranding from scrap to recycled materials essentially the metal recycling facilities you know they they’ve thought of it as like a bit of greenwashing because they consider it still sometimes a dirty you know profession and yeah sometimes it it can appear to be so though but then I have to point out what’s the alternative if you’re not Urban mining essentially taking the existing metals that you’ve already essentially refined from ore and you’ve already processed it into the metallics that you have today what’s the alternative the alternative is from scratch which is more energy intensive and by comparison a dirty process more CO2 less sustainable and so when you start putting into

those perspectives and you take a look at the North American Market of how we have more access to scrap SL recycled materials uh for the metals World versus other regions around the world we do fairly well in that regard can we do better yes but you know even the greenwashing in our world and the the metals manufacturing side still comes up because I’ve had conversations about knowing products have recycled materials in them for instance automobiles automobiles in the United States have a decent percentage of recycled Metals in them them washer and dryers have a decent percentage of recycled materials in them there’s a lot of recycled metallics in existing products today and they won’t Market it because they go down a very technical path of well we can’t necessarily guarantee that every single particular product has gotten that particular coil that has exactly that percentage of the point you know whatever percentage of the Recycled metallic in it so we’re not going to put it on there they went like so far the other direction could they do like a combination of all say hey out of all the cars we’ve you know produced

this year it equates to this much metal and about this percent of it is recycled material I mean do they have to do it per car because I mean I to I mean I totally agree with you that um this I think the mindset on scrap is changing recycl materially even though that may is not how it was once pictured but yeah like you said looking at what we would be doing instead um it would be a lot worse so yes they’re they’re starting to think about it there are some products that are out there where maybe you uh you know with like web 3 and tokenization and blockchains you can actually start tracking the particular shipment through the full supply chain to actually be able to say with the OEM this is exactly the percent percentage of the Recycled metallics that would be going into your product um that’s not necessarily available for every oam currently so we’re not quite there yet so they’re probably not going to do it um for every product so got some work to go it’s just hard when there just there’s just so much there’s so many

really specific Alloys and they’re going all over the country the world it’s it’s definitely a hard process to track for sure yes uh very much so um you know kind of still keeping in the the the metal space and a little bit more on the demographic of the metals industry as well as like the environmental world I’ve noticed in the past year when I’ve kind of crossed over into the sustainability World a handful of times in my career I’ve been pretty much in a male-dominated industry you know steel Metals manufacturing steel I think is around 20% female when I go over to sustainability to conferences to just online I don’t know what the exact percentage is but it’s more than 20% and so is that something that you noticed in your classes X number of years ago um if that’s a switch if there was an increase if it’s you know an industry that’s attracting yeah I would say it’s it’s a uh very it’s there’s it’s very different depending on what specific sector so I’ll give some examples so my classes I would say it was almost 50/50 um really really

similar marks um for for male and female but um you know actually being in the workforce has definitely been male dominated I mean and part of that is because I often don’t work with other sustainability teams sometimes I do and it’s been increasingly more but it’s often times you know a plant manager that is in charge of the scrap um or the facilities person and um you know someone that’s maybe not designated as uh an environmental position so it hasn’t quite translated the same since College uh through that and I also just know there’s a lot of people who have environmental degrees who aren’t work working in the environmental sector because there’s just not a lot of entrylevel positions to start and also a lot of times if there isn’t a specific environmental team they will pull people who are already in the company and give them that that position or someone who has a you know a man managing experience to to more so of like a team leader project manager not necessarily someone who has the environmental qualifications for it which is you know I understand that companies need to you know

some having someone internal for example is really helpful um it does make me a little concerned because we’re going to need more more environmental Executives coming up and there’s going to be this gap of people who don’t have the experience because they’re not getting the there’s not there’s not enough of the internships the entry level jobs to get people with their foot in the door and get experience and to contribute and not to say that you know someone who is you know in a project management uh role can’t contribute but there are certain nuances that you know that’s why you have an environmental degree you know and things like you know unintentionally greenwashing because it wasn’t something that they are aware about um it’s not not a necessarily a negative thing towards them it’s just they were probably tasked with something that they weren’t fully educated on um so going back to the women in the industry um I think that it is getting better I think getting younger people in the door too is getting better I think it’s really important to show that you have females in executive positions you know you

can’t just say that you support women in manufacturing or women in scrap and then not have any women in leadership and um I I would be curious about you know other environmental fields too um but I think that it’s uh definitely definitely getting better um in the in the scrap and metal World agreed for those that are interested in getting into the metals the manufacturing recycling sustainability worlds do you have any advice for them now that you’ve been in the industry for a while um I would say one is always advocate for your safety the scrap metal industry is one of the most dangerous places to work so make sure even if you’re a guest in a facility gota make sure you’re having the correct PPE um that is something that the whole industry I know is concerned about but that’s one thing is is uh very important um to Shapiro and to I know a lot of other people so that would be my my first one is whether you’re just doing a tour of a facility because you’re wanting to learn more or if you’re on the job or that’s the site

that you work at it is always something to put at the Forefront of of everyone’s mind um other things about the recycling industry um getting in there I would say you know take as many informational interviews as you can I called a ton of eard alumni and I was like hey tell me about your job I just want to learn what you do and what’s what’s actually the processes behind it and what helped you uh so that’s something that I would always recommend um to really any young professional in general and um I would say you know having a a deeper knowledge of the recycling processes is definitely helpful something that helped me you know I’ve been to so many different murfs waste energy sites land fills been on the ground where they’re giant claws scooping things up into incinerators uh definitely not glamorous but getting that experience you know boots on the ground has been really great for my career and understanding the actual processes of what’s going on behind the the recycling just more material you know once it gets to the site what actually happens to it um and you know

metal is is definitely in in that as well looking at the different um furnaces and smelters and the different ways that metal is melted and mixed together is just really important and something that um would just give a really good foundation for anyone looking to get into the recycling recycling industry and before we go uh because I just have to say huge thank you for your time today for your expertise you know sharing everything that you’ve uh you know shared with us this far is there anything that we’ve missed any points that you wanted to cover any topics that you know maybe we didn’t get to um in our short amount of time today no I’ll just I’ll just say one thank you so much for having me this has been so fun to chat with you um about all these things and I’ll just say I’m always looking to be a resource for anyone who has questions if anyone is listening and and wants to reach out or or have a question a followup question on what we talked about or something that’s maybe not even um you know directly in one of

our topics uh you know love to help out my clients and that’s the goal to continue to improve that um but I also just love to be a resource for anyone who’s looking to get some more questions about the recycling industry and for those that are listening slw watching what’s the best way to get a hold of you LinkedIn yeah LinkedIn Works uh for sure wonderful well Maddie Carlson sustainability consultant Shapiro thank you so much for coming on today this was really wonderful it was great to kind of step outside the metals world you know kind of rope it in a little bit but it was really wonderful to to get a a slightly different slash adjacent perspective of you know what we’re a part of and it’s it’s pretty cool to see you know the different careers that exist out there so uh just really appreciate what you’re a part of what you’re working on at Shapiro and everything that you’re bringing to the metals industry thank you great thanks again