66 BCBusiness February 2015 66 BCBusiness February 2015
four concrete enclosures stuffed with black, green, white
and red copper wire. Copper theft from Surrey's 26,000
streetlights was costing the city so much in vandalism,
it is now preemptively pulling out 340,000 kilograms of
perfectly functional copper wire and replacing it with a
cheaper aluminum to deter theft;
ABC has won the con-
tract to recycle all that wire. In the warehouse, 1,800-
kilogram bales of "bright and shiny" grade copper (worth
over $12,000 each) are piled high beside boxes of separated
titanium, spent brass bullet casings and high-value alloys.
Lorenzo reports that even with many cameras and 24-hour
security, attempts to rob this building still occur.
On the ferrous side of the yard, a CN railcar is sliced up
with excavator-mounted shears while a white pickup truck
(stripped of tires, valuable parts and fluids) is lifted by a
giant claw and dropped into a crusher. In less than one
minute, the vehicle is spit out, smaller than a fridge. There
are real fridges here too:
ABC has the contract to recycle all
the appliances collected through BC Hydro's rebate pro-
gram, which are subsequently sold to a recycler in Wash-
ington State, ripped into fragments by a specialized metal
"shredder," sorted and sold again.
When it comes down to it,
ABC's scrapyard is like any
other mining operation: success is determined by a com-
bination of commodity price, how much metal can be
pushed through the system and how cost-effectively the
commodity can be separated from waste.
"This is the end of the line for all of this," says Lorenzo,
motioning towards bins overflowing with end-of-life sinks,
barbecues and electrical transformers. "The cleaner it is
when it leaves, the more money we get for it."
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