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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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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