BCBusiness

February 2015 Why they Give

With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.

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62 BCBusiness February 2015 It's a big business that is only going to get bigger: as greenfield metal ore grades for commodities like copper continue to plummet, the amount of energy required to harvest what's left is rising. It will make more and more sense—both economically and environmentally— to increase efforts to mine our cities and industrial sites for the metals we need to live. On a recent visit to ABC, BCBusiness is met at the gate by 30-year-old Nick Lorenzo, ABC's environmental and safety specialist. Since Lorenzo started working here in 2007, the company has grown from three locations to nine—includ- ing a recent one in Fort St. John, established to exploit all the scrap being generated by B.C.'s oil and gas industry. Lorenzo points to a handful of men crouched in the middle of the yard, hand-sorting a pile of grimy brass and copper into piles. "Everyone starts in the yard," he says of the sorters. ABC remains a closely knit, fourth-genera- tion family business (owned by the Yochlowitz clan, with fourth-generation CEO David Yochlowitz now in charge), where all newbies must "learn their metals" on the ground; by the time workers spend a month sorting by hand, they can identify most scrap by touch. ABC Recycling acquires scrap metal, separates it into the purest possible "commodity streams" and sells it further up the recycling value chain. Consistent procurement of quality scrap is vital to profit- ability, and to that end, it's Randy Kahlon's job to, as he puts it, "feed the monster." As ABC's manager of business develop- ment, procurement and sales, he leads a seven-person team sourcing scrap from industrial and government customers while constantly scrambling to find new supply. He says it is

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