in this episode i get a chance to sit down with david hughes with copper reclaim take a listen on how david is changing the copper recycling game with his mobile weigh and pay system all right welcome everybody i’m sitting here with david hughes from copper reclaim how you doing david doing good nick how are you i’m doing good man so what you’re doing out there in the recycling world for copper is a game changer and i’d love to kind of show everyone and have you tell everyone what it is what is different about copper reclaim versus say like united metals like who i work for so it’s a convenience thing we’ll come out to you with our mobile truck we have scales and containers i weigh it right up there in front of the customer they get to see the weight they get to watch me write it down they get to watch me put it away and i give them a receipt and we pay them cash on the spot whether that’s at the job site at their shop in the middle of nowhere i’ve gone out in fields before i met people

so we just kind of bring the scrap yard to you and keeps them from having to pack it all up and travel and then unpack it let me do all the work so you’re saving you’re saving these electricians these plumbers these contractors are saving them time time right because they’re still getting the same value they would get most scrap yards probably more they’re probably paying them more because you buy so much i’d imagine you have a you can tighten your margins down a little so you can pay a little higher yeah so what is your number one clientele like who who are you helping mostly i’d say electricians are my number one and are you mainly going to their shops are you going to their their um are they going to their job sites what’s like the most common spot you know i’d say it’s probably 50 50. um i met most of my customers out on these new subdivisions that they’re building okay for probably three months straight i just drove all these new subdivisions all around the valley met them some people i just buy around the back of their truck they’ll

call me when it gets full and then some people take it back to their house and they call me when the garage gets full or so it’s probably 50 50 split and then what they’re selling you are they selling you just clean copper what are they selling you uh it’s a mix usually in between like romex insulated and bright and shiny and how are you buying like the romex how you buying the insulated by the percentage of copper inside okay so we like i’ll do a breakdown which we post online under copper reclaim okay and then that’ll tell me the percentage of copper versus insulation so when i buy it’s already bought off not the insulation but the copper inside of that so you’ve put the work in and you’ve broke down all the main types of wires so you know the percentage without even having to do it right there right if you had something weird for a customer and even if they were like gave you a sample would you give them the value on that or would you just take like an educated guess i’d give them the value on that

so you’d break it down do all that yeah and once you get the wire what do you do with it comes back to the shop where we have guys sorted okay into different categories for our copper choppers okay and then that’ll get dumped into there and get shredded up into a real fine copper and how many copper choppers does copper reclaim on two okay so let’s backtrack now you didn’t always work for copper reclaim no i mean i know this but not everyone else knows this right you let everyone know where you started let us let everyone know what brought you into recycling so i started uh with united metals back in june of 2018 i actually started cleaning brass and i was just a one-man show cleaning every little piece of brass by myself and stacking batteries and then in between that i would help out retail and then i got carried over into the converter reclaim for a little while where j milligan taught me some of that stuff got back into brass and then they moved me into the scale house where i ran the scale house for two and

a half years and then uh they created copper reclaim and this is where i’m at today so with all those experiences in the recycling world in the scrap yard do you think it what has it taught you most what does it taught you about customers was it what does it tell you about recycling one thing i’d like to because i know when i started in the recycling world i my eyes were like kind of just open because i didn’t know this world was so big yeah you know what was your biggest like takeaway once you started um all the different customers i didn’t know anything about recycling i’ve never worked a day in recycling in my life until i started with this company until i started with united metals and uh just like you had opened my eyes to all kinds of things i didn’t know how anything was processed i didn’t know like who was how much metal was actually being recycled i had no idea you could recycle half the metal you could and so yeah it opened my eyes to everything and now it’s opening doors to a lot more and

one of the coolest things that i think has come out of recycling for myself is all the relationships i’ve built and a lot of them started as truly like a business to business relationship more of like a professional but i have so many people that i’m just truly friends with not just and a lot of them are co-workers but a lot of them are just customers so i think that’s like with the heart and soul of the scrapyards the recyclers is that we’re one of the service industries where it’s really got that commitment to each other you got to put a lot of trust in each other yeah because the value on scrap changes like this you know copper’s up five cents today you know and tomorrow might be down 10. it’s all about consistency though you got to stay consistent you got to learn your customers you know your and what you guys are doing is changing the game for scrap yards i like seeing it i like seeing the the innovation i like seeing that stuff um gary vee always talks about try to put yourself out of business um try

to be you know like take uber for example like american taxi the biggest taxi company in the world in the united states they should have invented uber but they didn’t right you know say like hilton they should have invented airbnb but they didn’t and full disclosure reclaim is a sister company of united metals and you’ve really just taken it and just made it your own and that’s something with all of us combined we wanted to kind of see the next evolution the next step in recycling and and we see a lot of value in providing a mobile scrap yard like you said and we don’t want to just stay you know here in boise like i want to see you grow this thing into like a empire so where do you see copper reclaim in five years i see it in states all around the northwest okay eventually branching out and then hopefully you know me getting to travel around and help set those up around different states so you would be able to help set up like every area would you give them kind of just give them your blueprint on how you

did it because we’ve you’ve found a lot of success doing it yeah um what what would all that blueprint have what would you what value would you give say you got joe blow up in washington that wants to do it and he’s got a lot of hustle to him but he doesn’t know anything about copper like how do you get him trained up well we take him down here okay show them how to break the wire down find the percentages get them familiar with the names of the wire versus like what we call it versus what electricians call it because it is two different things when we’re talking about it and explain to him that it’s all relationship driven if they don’t trust you then you’re not going to have a relationship and you’re not going to get their copper so everything has to be very transparent with each other and truthful with each other otherwise it just won’t work yeah i think you hit it right on the head the transparency is important in this day and age with the you know with everything on the internet there’s no more trade secrets it’s

all out there but there is still a lot of value in putting the work in like doing the breakdowns you know taking the time to have you know like sage edit it you know put it out there for us because without that without putting the information out there for everyone then there there could be a little bit of unclarity on like what percentage you know romex has like the yellow one versus the the orange one versus the white one like you’ve broke all those down right but the electricians they don’t know that so if they can just go to like your website and say oh you know this guy’s got it here here and here and this is the exact percentage that i should be getting paid for then it’s all out on the table yep and then you could really break that out and share that information with guys up in washington and oregon california utah you know and that’s where i would love to see this thing go you know start pacific northwest and just the whole united states yeah you know i think that would be awesome i think it could

truly happen man i think it’s gonna change how everyone recycles i don’t think you’ll see well i think you’re kind of seeing it to a certain extent with all the junk companies like there’s so many junk companies out there it’s growing around here with those yeah there’s a new one all the time you know and you know you got they’ve obviously found a lot of value because they haul just a lot of scrap you know and they’re charging people yep now you’re driving around and paying people and there is no charge there’s no convenience charge there’s no container charge like we offer bin service which is also free yeah what kind of bins do you give out so we have roller bins we have 96 gallon carts so i’ve dropped those at people’s houses shops a lot like a garbage can yeah you’d have yeah yeah except it’s our own color of a garbage can and so that way it doesn’t get confused with anything else it’s definitely our own with our logo and everything on it and then your customers can keep their their scrap their scrap copper not like in the back

of a pickup yeah because that’s another thing like we like dealing with only like reputable people selling it yes and when you’re giving those to businesses they’re able to keep it out of the hands of like all the thieves you know they’re able to tuck it away put it in their utility trailer take it back to their shop keep it secure rather than again left at a job site then you get these guys just stealing it you know and i hate that more than anything because that’s what gives so many scrappers and scrap yards they’re doing things the right way a bad name so if you just take that variable out even with a mobile service where it’s not sitting as long you know that just deters theft right there too they know you’re going to be running around you know and they know it’s secure you know it’s going to just kind of change the game even farther yeah now i’ve seen other uh other scrap yards they leave bins at customer shops but they’re not on wheels and so a lot of customers they don’t really like that because it’s stuck in

one spot that they can’t move all of our carts and stuff are on wheels so they can wheel it out of the way move it whatever they need to do so it also helps them that way do you see any other innovations any other changes to copper reclaims brand to how you do things do you have any ideas how to make it better or is that just kind of something you’re so like day to day and work refining it we’re still working on refining it we’re still growing and learning every day and and every week we’re getting new customers which also helps us learn because everybody’s different everybody does stuff different so every time you meet a new person you learn a new thing where’s your service area how far do you go i’ve gone all the way out to rexburg idaho uh which is east idaho um all the way out to ontario and northern idaho is my next goal this summer so you’re going all the way to like eastern oregon to eastern idaho it’s kind of your area yep and you’re still kind of meeting new customers all the time you’re

doing a referral program yep so if you refer somebody to copper reclaim and i buy their wire just depending on how much we buy we give up to 200 cash okay how do people get a hold of you how do people set up like an appointment uh they could call my office or my cell phone number okay that’s 208 867-9802 and even if you call my office number 208 336-2828 it still rings to my cell phone okay so i’m hardly ever in the office i’m always on the road do you prefer phone calls tags how do you prefer to get either or doesn’t matter to you it doesn’t matter all right we’ll put that on the bottom here so people can reach out to you okay all right awesome thank you sir thank you you