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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bcbusiness.ca February 2015 BCBusiness 65 extremely competitive. ABC bids to salvage metal from end- of-life pulp mills, farms and bridges. On the day we are in the yard, there are decommissioned tanks, an entire airplane, tens of thousands of spent brass bullet casings, cars, railcars and copper wire of every conceivable size and thickness. In an average month, nearly 20,000 tonnes of metal will move through this yard, and all of the heavy lifting is performed by machinery: three material handlers, four excavation vehicles and a fleet of "skid-steer" loaders zip around the property in an atmosphere of controlled chaos. Depending on the task, the excavators are fitted with giant magnets, grasping metal claws or "jaws of life" shear attachments, the latter capable of slicing up railcars like scissors through paper. There are also immense, Tim Burtonesque cutting and compressing machines: a "guil- lotine" that chops metal into smaller pieces and a non- ferrous compressor that works much the way a farm baler packages hay, except the sound effects are much scarier. The yard is divided into two equal halves: one for non- ferrous metals, including copper and aluminum sold by the pound; the other is for ferrous metals, mostly bulkier iron and steel sold by the tonne. (Ferrous and non-ferrous metals are like apples and oranges: completely different commodities with different markets for sale, necessitating strict separation.) The weight and size of the ferrous scrap necessitated the construction of a spur-line connecting the yard to the main CN rail track nearby ( ABC owns 100 of their own railcars). While most non-ferrous metal will end up in Asia via a container ship, the ferrous stuff will be melted down in North America. Copper is the high-value metal, and Lorenzo leads us to

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