I
f Martians ever do visit our blue planet, there’s a good case for taking them to Ray’s Metal Depot as evidence of what industrial man has been up to all these years.
At an hour-long talk at the Iola Public Library — titled “Junk?” — in which Ray Maloney spoke to a small crowd about the history and impact of recycling in America, the owner-operator of the LaHarpe-based scrapyard touched on the many items he buys and sells out at the 24-acre section of land along Highway 54, known affectionately — especially by middle-aged men with a certain lust for home improvement — as “Ray-mart.”
A partial list of the recyclable items mentioned Tuesday evening, many of which Maloney illustrated with slides, include: aluminum cans; copper; zinc; insulated wire, including strings of Christmas lights; all kinds of brass (“here are some valves, tubing, a couple of faucets, brass shell casings, there’s a French Horn”); transmissions; lawn chairs; mobile home siding; lawnmowers (“best thing we ever did was start saving these mowers — sell a heck of a lot of these things”); electric motors; TV antennas; wheels; storm windows; coat racks; ACSR wire; pots, pans; light fixtures; “Russell Stover was bringing me a lot of aluminum foil for a while”; stainless steel; cast iron; car batteries (“I’ll give 10 cents a pound for those”); “here’s a big pile of cars that we mashed down”; oil field pipe; steel turnings; “engine blocks, hubcaps, more pipe”; spindles; “farm scraps”; car starters; oil cans; tires; motorcycles; old fencing; saws; “then, for you ladies, here we go” — Maloney summons the next slide — “yard art!” (which is to say, a giant wheel, a clothesline pole, part of an old wooden wagon, and an enormous ball of barbed wire); chain link fencing, which lay in Ray’s lot, side by side, in thick rolls, like great silver burritos; 55-gallon burn barrels, which you can buy for $10 a drum; tires; cinder blocks; H-beams, I-beams; “and then, of course, there’s our miscellaneous stuff….”
Maloney is funny and articulate in person, and modest, probably unduly so, in describing the business he created 25 years ago. “We’re really small,” he insists, describing for the audience of about 15 the essential itinerary of each piece of scrap that leaves his lot. “Where we send our stuff, they’re the ones you want to look at, if you want to see big yards. I’m not big enough to go directly into a mill. So we contract with other recycling centers, to larger scrapyards basically, where the stuff, [after it’s been sorted], goes through a big grinder…and is hammered into pieces about as big as your fist.
“Then they load it into rail cars and ship it off to a mill, who melts it and turns it into long products, like channel iron, H-beam, I-beam, whatever they want to produce. And from there it goes into your manufacturing sector, who builds your cars, motorcycles, appliances. After those things reach their end-use — say, when your car or motorcycle gets old — it all comes back to me. And then,” says Maloney with an it’s-just-common-sense inflection that makes you wonder why you never got into the recycling business yourself, “the whole process starts all over again.”
The circle Maloney depicts isn’t perfectly round, however. The metal man chafes at what he views as increasingly hostile governmental intrusion. “I keep telling everybody that, before long, the recycling business is going to have more compliance regulations than the nuclear energy industry.”
He described for the library crowd his most recent beef: “Coming in July, they want us to take a picture of every single commodity that we get — on the scale, with the weight. Well, see, it’s like Eddie here,” Maloney says, pointing to a large man with grease in the creases of his knuckles, who sat in the first row, and wore a stocking cap out of the bottom of which poked thick gray curls. “Eddie’s a good customer. If he tears down a washing machine, he may bring in a pound of aluminum on the back of the machine. Then, the housing around that is sometimes zinc, then you have a stainless steel drum, then you have an electric motor, then you have insulated wire. After all is said and done, in today’s market, the thing may bring nine bucks.
“But I’ve got eight separate things on there that I’m logging off this one washing machine. Well, every one of those things I’m supposed to take a picture of. And then, here’s the killer part of it: At the end of every single business day, starting in July, I’ve got to send all those pictures and all those tickets to the KBI,” who believes the new policy will allow it to better police large-scale metal theft. A claim Maloney doesn’t buy.
In fact, he called the state’s attorney general when the legislation was in the works and expressed, in so many words, his vast displeasure.
And then, of course, there’s the fact that the scrap business is, even more than most industries, a leaf in the wind of extremely variant market fluctuations.
“Two years ago was actually the best time to be recycling,” explained Maloney. “That was when China’s boom was on and everybody was really pumping it out and the metals were worth more. … A lot of people right now are not buying a whole lot. We used to buy one or two loads of scrap a day, which was like 20 to 40 tons. We had trucks going out every single day. Now, with prices up a little bit, we’re shipping probably one truck, 20 tons, a week. Around the first of the year, it was one truck every two weeks.
“This industry goes through cycles, usually every five to seven years. You just ride it out.”
What he may lose in flat economic cycles, however, he’s gained in the investments he’s made over the years in modern technology. From the conveyer system that quickly and efficiently sorts his massive can recycling operation to the outsized cranes with cutting attachments that slice through metal as if it were meringue.
“It sure beats sitting out there like I started, in 1991 and all through those first eight years, with a cutting torch. Just cutting it and throwing the stuff in an old Ford 600 bucket and loading it on a 1950 Chevy dump truck, and hauling it out. Things have changed a lot. For the better.”
On Tuesday, Maloney wore his trademark wide-brimmed leather hat and a work shirt with his name on the pocket. He held his audience rapt. But, by his own admission, he was upstaged by his teenage granddaughter, who operated the slideshow, and by Gus, his junkyard dog — a gentle, doe-eyed golden retriever, who lay panting loudly at his owner’s feet — and on whose leash, during the entire time he spoke, Maloney never let go.
