Living on Scrap

How two men found their calling in the garbage.

by Isaiah Thompson

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Published: Jul 29, 2008

Photo By: Mark Stehle Ron Jordan (left) and Greg Loper, professional scrappers. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Greg Loper pulls up to the curb in front of his house, steering his worn mountain bike with one hand and holding a cell phone in the other, scowling at the voice coming through it.

"I'm at my house, man! Waiting for you!" he shouts into the mouthpiece. The voice says something back, and Greg hangs up. He stares at the silent phone for a second. Greg is skinny, an unimposing black man of 46 years, but his arms have the lean strength that comes from decades of labor. In one quick motion, he picks up his bike and throws it. It lands noisily in the gutter.

"Goddamn sonofabitch!" he shouts.

It's been a bad morning. Greg and his business partner, Ron, were supposed to hit the road to go collect metal at 8 a.m. sharp. But Ron didn't show, and Greg had to walk the kids to summer school, rushing back on his bike so as not to lose any more time. Now, Ron says he's got to take his girlfriend somewhere — the doctor's, the lawyer's, somewhere.

The problem is, no Ron means no truck, and no truck means no metal, and no metal means no money — unless Greg wants to go back to pushing around the shopping cart, like he used to in the days before he met Ron.

"I got some metal 'round back," he says finally. After a tortured pause, he adds: "We'll take the cart."

The backyard of Greg's Kensington row home is a tiny square plot, crowded with a half-dozen tidy piles of what looks like junk — old tires, lengths of wire, bricks, buckets. The shopping cart stands in the middle, empty. Greg eyes it with the sort of look a lumberjack might give a Swiss army knife.

Still fuming, he picks up a brick and hurls it at a discarded glass pane, shattering the glass in a single violent instant. A trace of satisfaction passes through his face at the sound.

He walks over, gingerly picks up the frame and sets it in the cart.

"Aluminum," he says, the anger suddenly gone from his voice. As he putters around the yard, collecting bits of metal, prying the plastic casing off a Yuengling sign, a calm comes over him. He gathers a yard of wire housed in yellow plastic — "copper," he says. "You can get paid for wire, if you get enough of it."

When it's filled, he pushes the cart slowly up Frankford, past Lehigh, under the train tracks, and around the corner onto a crumbling side street that is home to Philadelphia Scrap Metal, a small, dismal metal wasteland contained by barbed wire. Already, business is hopping; as he approaches, a half-dozen other people appear from nowhere: a few in trucks, some pushing carts like Greg's, others hauling their metal by bicycle.

Greg waves hello, shoves his cart onto the scale, helps unload it, and is given a slip of paper, which he takes to a booth across the room. He comes back with a few bills clenched in his fist — 15 bucks.

Just then his phone rings. He answers, lets loose a string of cusswords into it, and hangs up. A few seconds later, a dusty blue pickup — a 1990 Chevy Cheyenne — rumbles up. A man sticks his head out the window.

"Let's go," he says.

"Oh, now you ready," Greg shouts back. "Meanwhile, I'm pushing the damn cart."

Ron Jordan, Greg's partner, is white, middle-aged, with a wiry frame and a drawn, weather-beaten face, streaked on one side by a long scar left over from a knife wound. No sooner do he and Greg get in the truck than Ron launches into a monologue about his problems with his girlfriend.

"I had to take her to the doctor," he says. Ron's girlfriend is a never-ending source of trouble for him, but he's entirely devoted to her anyway. "I gotta see about getting her a lawyer, too."

Unchecked by Greg or a pile of metal to stop him, Ron can talk nonstop for hours. He has a penchant for unleashing the occasional bit of SAT vocabulary.

"This guy's real cantankerous," he says, sticking out a thumb toward Greg. "You know what cantankerous means?"

"Here we go," says Greg, rolling his eyes and leaning his head against the window.

Greg lights a cigarette and settles his gaze out the right-side window, watching for the telltale glint of metal.

"We gonna find metal today," Ron murmurs as they head onto the street. "I can smell it."

Metal is almost infinitely recyclable, and scrapping — collecting old metal for reuse — has been going on since the advent of smelting, more than 5,000 years ago. In this country, scrap took on practical as well as symbolic meaning during World War II, when the government organized massive scrap drives, setting collection goals in millions of tons and running public-service ads exhorting the public to do its part.

Recently, scrapping has been in the papers for another reason: theft. Across the country and around the world, a rash of metal theft is under way. The stories are often alarming: In London, more than 1,000 Telecom customers lost service when copper wires were dug up, leading to a police crackdown. In Australia, 30 cattle were left without water when the pipes to their troughs were stolen. Cities across the U.S. have reported bizarre thefts of everything from manhole covers to railroad tracks to highway light poles.

Philadelphia has been hit hard. This June, some 200 residents of a Logan apartment complex were evacuated after thieves stole the valuable copper plumbing in the basement. Manhole covers throughout the city have been disappearing at an alarming rate. Just last week, a 12-foot bronze statue of a race horse was stolen from the Garden State Park Shopping Center in Cherry Hill. Police found the remains, reduced to bits, after a tip led them to the preserved head.

This rise in theft can be explained very simply: Due to increasing demand from overseas factories, metal has doubled in value just in the last year. In response, Philadelphia police have amped up surveillance, politicians are drafting new laws and regulations to stop the rising theft, and the scrap industry is scrambling to defend itself.

But in all the commotion, another story has been overlooked. The spike in the price of metal provides new incentive to thieves, yes — but it's tipped the scales in favor of legitimate scrappers, as well.

The scrap industry depends on enterprising individuals to collect the metal it can't get at — the old metal buried in 100 million homes, the metal discarded in vacant lots and thrown carelessly on the curb, destined for dumps. People higher up in the industry call these folks "peddlers." Greg and Ron use a different word: "scrappers." They work for themselves, taking other people's trash and turning it into money.

Ron Jordan (left) and Greg Loper, professional scrappers. How two men found their calling in the garbage. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Greg admits readily that there are plenty of junkies who scrap metal, and plenty of unscrupulous scrappers. But he's neither, and he takes offense at the one-sided picture that's been painted in recent media.

"A lot of people think that because you scrappin' you've got to be a drug dealer," Greg says. "We're scrappers," he reiterates, "not thieves."

Simply by patrolling the streets on trash days, diving into Dumpsters and keeping their eyes open, Greg and Ron rarely fail to bring in at least one truckload, which can fetch anywhere from $80 to $200. An average day, they figure, yields them about $100 apiece or more — working an average of six days a week (they often work all seven, sometimes twice a day), that comes out to just over $30,000 a year for each of them.

It's an honest trade — and a legal one, city officials acknowledge. Licenses & Inspections requires a permit to run a scrap yard, says deputy Commissioner Eileen Evans, but not to collect metal off the street. And as far as the police are concerned, "Once it's on the curbside, it's legal," says officer Jillian Russell from the police public affairs unit.

For someone like Greg, that's enough to realize a dream he thought he'd never achieve: doing honest work, making decent money and, for the first time in his life, acting as his own boss.

"I ran into scrapping and it's finally like I have a chance to be me," he says. "I was at a dead-end job and I was torn, mentally and physically. ... You know what I'm saying? Even if I got another job, man, with no education it's going to be bullshit. You might get three, four hundred dollars a week. After taxes, that's like $250. Who can live on that?" Metal changed everything, he says. "Scrapping saved my life."

Today, like most days, Ron and Greg head into Northeast Philadelphia to look for metal. "Northeast is where the money is," Greg explains. "Too many people scrapping in the city."

"You've got to be tactical about this stuff," adds Ron. "Tactitional."

Greg and Ron met at a scrap yard. Greg was still pushing the cart then. He had just gotten a call from someone he knew who was doing a cleanout and had metal.

"[Ron] overheard my conversation and said, 'Hey, you sound like you know what you're talking about,'" Greg recalls. "'I got a truck and you know where to go.' So we got together."

"Biggest mistake of my life," Ron says.

"Best thing that ever happened to him," Greg replies.

Equipped with a truck, they started making serious money. They've been partners for just over two months now, long enough to develop a rough route, but they're still figuring out the business. Being their own bosses, for instance, has its dangers: Driving around their own neighborhood all day, the line between work and the rest of life can get blurry.

"I got to bring her some orange juice real quick," Ron says the minute they hit the road.

Greg drops his head into his hands. "You what?"

"Real quick," says Ron, staring ahead. "I got to leave early today, anyway. I gotta see about getting this lawyer for her."

They make the stop, Greg muttering invectives the whole time.

From the moment they set foot in the truck together, Greg and Ron insult each other ceaselessly. Nothing is taboo — they call each other motherfucker, threaten to kick each other's asses, mock each other's foibles. At any given moment, it can seem like the partnership is on the verge of falling apart completely.

And yet they go scrapping nearly every day, weekends included. Sometimes, they go out again in the evening, especially if it's trash night. They always bring back something.

It's slim pickings today as they make their way northeast. Ron drives; Greg is the lookout. When he sees metal, he calls out softly: "Ho, ho." On the curb outside a house, they find a few odds and ends — a bit of pipe, a heavy gasket. A few residential trash piles yield a brass lamp, a bunch of coat hangers and a length of Christmas lights, all of it worth no more than a few dollars.

"Every little bit counts," says Greg, throwing the stuff into the back. Ron nods a silent amen. This is their motto — they say it to each other, back and forth, all day, every day.

"You're jumping in and out of the truck all day long," he says, getting back in. "And sometimes it's for nothing. But sometimes you hit the jackpot."

Things begin to look up when they hit a Dumpster behind Macy's. For a week or two, some guys working on the interior have been throwing out metal. Today, they've filled the Dumpster with some kind of flexible alloy. It's lightweight — not a proper jackpot — but there's a lot of it.

The insults cease as Greg and Ron spring into action. Greg climbs into the Dumpster and begins extracting the long metal pieces from the depths below his feet, handing them over the side to Ron, who arranges them in the truck. They work quickly and almost without speaking. After making short work of the big pieces, Greg retrieves a power driver and begins removing the smaller-but-heavier aluminum slides off some drawers. Twenty minutes after they started, the truck is full. Ron ties the mountain of scrap shakily to the frame of his truck with a length of cable, and they hit the road.

"We got a load on there," Ron says after a pause. "I can feel it."

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Greg brightens. "You can feel it?"

Ron nods.

"When he says he can feel it, he usually can," Greg explains.

The Rhino Recycling scrap yard at 2942 E. Tioga is bustling with activity when they pull in. They wait until a worker standing at the 12-foot metal fence that surrounds the yard lazily waves them in and points them to the rear of the yard, where they pull the truck up backward to an approximately 30-foot-high pile of metal. Lined up alongside the mountain are other scrappers. A few wave. "It's Ebony and Ivory," shouts one cheerfully, referring to the 1982 No. 1 hit single duet featuring Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder.

It takes them less than 10 minutes to unload the metal. Ron drives the truck back to the scale — stopping halfway to jump it with a spare battery — while Greg takes the aluminum to a separate scale to get it weighed, as well, and collects the money. He gets back in the car, fingering the cash: just over $120.

"Here's 10 for gas," says Greg, handing Ron a $10 bill. Ron takes it and folds it in the palm of his hand. "Then here's your half," Greg adds, handing Ron a thicker wad of bills. "And I owe you 10. So take this and give me 10," he says, handing over a 20 and extracting a 10 from Ron's palm. The divvy complete, each puts his money in his pocket.

Where does all that metal go? From scrapper's trucks — and their shopping carts and bicycles and hands — it's collected in packaging facilities like Rhino Recycling and sent to sorting facilities, where it's shredded by giant metal teeth, separated from the debris and loaded onto ships bound for the Far East. There, the metal is melted, made into ingots, and put into all manner of consumer products, many sent back to the U.S. for sale.

In a time when almost every other sector of the U.S. economy is suffering, the scrap export industry is booming like never before. The spike in the price of metal is no mere fluke of the market, no smoky haze of subprime hocus-pocus. Emerging economies — in countries like Brazil, India and, of course, China — have ramped up production over the last 10 years, and the demand for metal has gone up accordingly.

The United States no longer produces the quantities of metal goods that it used to. But for the last 70 years or so, our wealthy country has consumed vast, vast quantities of it, most of which go to waste. As far as the global scrap market is concerned, the United States is, in essence, a vast scrap yard.

The trouble, says David Biddle, executive director of the Greater Philadelphia Commercial Recycling Council, is getting that metal recycled.

"There's easy stuff, and then there's the hard stuff," Biddle explains. "The easy stuff is being recycled. The hard stuff is getting thrown in the trash still."

The result is more mining, he says, and that's bad. "[Mining] is phenomenally labor intensive," he explains. "It's phenomenally energy intensive, capital intensive, environmentally intensive. ... Between recycling metal and digging for it or taking off the side of a mountain, there's no comparison."

Right now, says Biddle, there is no systematic way to get at "the hard stuff" — old appliances, bits of metal in people's houses. In fact, there is only one group of people in America who are getting the hard stuff recycled: scrappers.

"It's unfortunate that there's a stigma placed on these guys," says Camden Iron & Metal Inc. (CI&M) president Joe Balzano. Scrap is the biggest industry in Camden, and CI&M is the city's single biggest job provider, employing some 245 union workers.

"These guys are hard-working individuals, performing a valuable function. A lot of this metal is lying around as trash. And this is the most recycled commodity in the world."

Balzano admits that theft is a problem in his industry, but as he sees it, politicians are going about solving the problem backward. A bill currently before the state legislature seeks to regulate the scrap business by, among other things, requiring that scrap yards hold their metal for up to 36 hours once police notify them of stolen scrap. It also provides for penalties for scrap collectors who fail to comply or are found to have stolen metal on their property.

Balzano argues that most of the time, scrap yards have no way of knowing whether metal is stolen. He thinks the city should create a license for legit scrappers and eliminate the incentive for junkies and thieves looking for a quick buck. "If somebody can show me how you're going to identify stolen metal," Balzano argues, "I'd like to see it."

Leaving the yard, money in hand, Greg and Ron pass by an open gate, and glance back at the mountain of metal behind them. "Man, look at all that money," says Ron wistfully. "Imagine if you owned that shit, come every morning and watch it pile up."

Ron and Greg don't steal. But plenty of people do, and temptation stares them in the face everywhere. Later, they drive by an open industrial lot, where large sheets of heavy metal lay rusting. Their eyes turn hungrily to watch it pass.

"Working with me, you ain't got no temptation to steal," Greg says to Ron. "'Cause I don't steal."

Neither man is a stranger to crime — both have had trouble in their past, Ron more recently than Greg. His record is littered with arrests, most of them for retail theft. His most recent stint in prison was five and a half years, and ended more than a year ago. He's currently on probation, and says he's been drug-free for 10 years.

Greg didn't always live straight, either. He was born and raised in West Philadelphia, in the projects. His family, he says, wasn't bad off. But Greg got into trouble anyway.

"I'm an ex-gangsta, man," he says matter-of-factly. "When most people was working and going to school, we was out selling drugs and stealing and beating the shit out of people." At some point, selling drugs turned into using drugs. Greg became addicted to crack-cocaine and wound up doing several stints in county jail. In his 20s while he was still banging, the crimes ranged from tresspass to robbery to assault; when he was older, he was arrested mostly for possession. In 1996, he was shot five times with an AK-47, and he's still got a permanent limp to keep as a reminder.

Still, he finished high school at Martin Luther King and has worked all manner of jobs since, to help support his enormous family — he has seven step-kids, four biological children and four grandchildren, many of whom live in his house. He's been a landscaper, a security guard, a shared-ride driver, a certified nurses' assistant and a laborer. He learned about scrapping from a man named Alfred Gregory, who had known tough times himself. A self-proclaimed former drug dealer, crackhead and abusive husband, Alfred found salvation in Jesus — and scrap. He eventually started his own business, "Scrappy G's."

Alfred, who knew Greg's son from church, invited Greg to come work for him collecting scrap. Greg needed the money and Alfred needed the help. Alfred taught Greg the ins and outs of scrapping. Along with the gospel of Jesus, Alfred preached a kind of scrapping gospel, a message to those who seek to save themselves in scrap. There was one essential commandment: "First and foremost, in this business," Gregory said, "you don't steal."

"Al was a special dude, man, and I learned from him," Greg recalls. "You conduct yourself the way your teacher taught you. Some people don't give a shit — but I'm very particular about where I get stuff. Because I believe in the Lord, man."

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

They're waiting in line for gas when Greg gets a call from his stepson, who's doing cleanouts with a crew in Kensington. He's got metal, he tells Greg, and they can have it, if they get there by 11:30 a.m., when he has to leave.

"God looks out for us," says Ron reverently, "and he gives us scrap."

But then they hit a snag. Ron insists on stopping in the Nazareth Hospital parking lot on the way.

"Won't take but five minutes and we'll be back on the road," he promises.

Greg turns the eye of death on him. "Yo, we got metal waiting for us, and you want to check out some Dumpster that some scrapping motherfucker said had metal. Come on, man."

By the time they get to Kensington, it's already 20 after 11. Greg's stepson calls again. "We almost there," Greg says, his voice soft, his face tense.

"He's got a refrigerator and some shit like that," Greg says, putting down the phone. He claps his hands.

"Come on, man. Drive this bitch."

Ron pulls the truck into a side street only to find it blocked at the end by a garbage truck. It's trash day.

"I knew it," he yells. "I knew a trash truck was going to be here."

"So why'd you turn?" Greg shouts, cradling his temples in his hands. "Why me?"

"I don't know," says Ron. "Why me, too?"

Ron backs the truck out and points it toward the next block, when another garbage truck appears.

"They're everywhere!" Greg shouts.

"This is a real debacle," moans Ron. "A real debacle. There's probably scrappers circling like vultures."

When they get to the house, Greg's stepson is waiting outside. A clean-cut kid in his late teens — he just graduated from high school — he comes to the car and shakes the men's hands.

"It's all yours," he says, pointing to the doorway.

The house is a hideous, mold-infested, cockroach-ridden mess. The place smells of rot and urine, and the previous owners' belongings are piled in the center of the room and strewn across the floor — trash, now scrap. There's a lot of metal: fans, gym equipment, iron bars, bed frames and, the coup de grâce, a refrigerator.

"This," says Ron, his chest swelling as if taking in a long breath of clean mountain air, "is a jackpot."

Later that evening, as the sun is going down and the city is finally cooling off, the stoop in front of Greg's house is full of children — his grandkids and their friends. Greg looks out from the second-story window, puffing contentedly on a cigarette and watching them play, when Ron pulls up in the truck for a night run.

It's trash day in the neighborhood, and the two wind slowly through the streets, eyeing the garbage as it comes out of the houses. It's slow going, and stopping in the narrow streets is hard. ("These obstreperous white people," Ron laments of the cars going by.)

Ron, as usual, recites his woes; Greg, as usual, cuts into him. But the stakes are lower now — whatever they collect tonight is just a head start on tomorrow — and the two fall into a quiet rhythm, at moments operating almost as a single unit: Ron drives on, ready to stop on a dime, and Greg looks out the window, watching.

At times like this, when the pickings are few and far between, it seems like there can't be enough scrap on the street to fill the truck. But Greg says he never worries about the metal running out.

"Nah," he replies. "There's millions of people in this city, man, millions. And each one have 20, 30 pieces of metal in their homes — that's a couple million times 30. There will always be scrap."

Suddenly he notices a pile on Ron's side. "Ho, ho," he calls out softly. Ron jumps out to get it. Greg goes on.

"Scrapping, man, it's got its ups and downs," he says, watching Ron retrieve a few pieces of metal. "But I don't really see the downs, honestly."

(isaiah.thompson@citypaper.net)