Image © Jose 2025
No matter how much recycling, repurposing, refurbishing, repairing and other “re” activities I do, this house has a lot of things that need to be disposed of. I hesitate to call it junk or worse, because one man’s trash can be another’s treasure.
My friend who lives close to us with his family is a man used to renovating houses; he is also one of the most can-do-anything-with-his-hands people I’ve ever met, and he knows how to deal with any phase of a renovation, including getting rid of stuff. He saw me piling up stuff and taught me the obvious: differentiate, with a deep understanding of value to others. So, we started to separate the materials – copper, aluminum, iron, and then mixed materials. Last Saturday morning we went to the scrapyard, and it was a field day.
I have been in scrapyards before. I actually lived in a city with a huge scrapyard that started to be far away from the town center and then 20 years later was almost in the middle of it. Everyone liked to make fun of the scrapyard family, but they put their children through college, one became a doctor and the other a lawyer, it was clear that the business model of the scrapyard worked somehow, at least for that family.
Saturday morning, early so we wouldn’t hit rush hour at the scrapyard (yes, there is one), my friend and I headed to this place. It’s in the middle of suburbia, pretty inconspicuous. We drive in; there are already a few older-generation vans and beat-up trucks, majority, if not all, guys – scruffy, rough-looking, everyone minding their own business. The people working there were separating materials into big containers; one of them operating a forklift was shouting at the others in Spanish. They were a mix of races, those that probably will do whatever needed to sustain their families. The guy that came and met us had an accent and he knew his metals; he identified what was in the wrong bucket and placed the higher-value stuff in a trolley. My friend went with him to a caravan where a guy gave my friend a receipt based on the weight of the different materials. Then we weighed the van we were in, headed to an area that looked like you were driving backwards almost to the edge of the world. We got out of the car and threw the other stuff into a pit that must have been cleaned up recently. To the left, the crane with a hand like a huge octopus was moving the scrap from one place to another; to the right, the huge compactor turned said scrap into mangled, brick-like blocks like we see in mobster movies. After we unloaded, we went to the scales again; the guy in the drive-through window gave my friend cash for the valuable stuff and for the less valuable. We made over $300 with a Tacoma long bed that was not 100% full. We then went to a place nearby and treated ourselves to one of the best hearty breakfasts I’ve had in a while, a caravan with arepas, butifarras, chicharrón and eggs Benedict with a very thick slice of Canadian bacon. This type of underbelly place probably always existed; there was always stuff that reached some sort of end of life, either by design or lack of it. While I know this has become worse and worse with the way we consume, this is clearly a situation where one man’s trash is another’s treasure. What we got paid felt good when we think the alternative would have been to pay someone to come pick the junk, but there is no doubt this is valuable to others, who will pay much more to the scrapyard for it. The business model works; this was one of the quickest and cleanest ways I have been serviced lately. For those that want to generate cash with not too many questions asked, this works perfectly. I am not romanticizing this business nor the place; I am sure there is plenty of activity that might be borderline illegal (remember the mobster movies?), but if you had to design a place, a system, a service that worked for the target customers and even for society (these places operate legally and with rules, and you do know what happens to cities when the folks collecting our trash go on strike…), this might be a great place to look at. It’s not pretty, smells like a refinery, some hard work involved, you need to check your tires before you drive away, but it works
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