its going to get worse
By the time Clarence Inman paid all the bills associated with his Dumas recycling operation, the $79 he netted for the last load of aluminum cans he sold to a North Little Rock recycling center - 6,400 pounds in all - didn't begin to cover the rented lot, utilities on the portable building and the gas to haul the cans.
"I lost big time," he said last week from his Rison home. "Right now is a bad time for anyone to be in recycling."
The fall in Inman's fortune has coincided with a steep, global economic downturn that has sent the prices of oil, aluminum and other commodities plunging on world markets, a decline that may well determine how many used beverage containers Arkansans will see on the side of the road in the coming months.
When the price of aluminum cans reached 85 cents a pound this year at the Express Recycling Center, an arm of the Tenebaum Recycling Group, Mark DeWitt thought his operation might process 11 million pounds this year, up from the nine million pounds the center has processed in recent years. Machines bind the cans into colorful, shiny 900-pound bales. But whereas the center used to routinely ship out a truckload a day, last week saw the center schedule only three truckloads.
"If [the price] gets any lower you'll start to see a lot more cans on the side of the road," DeWitt said. "We try to accommodate everyone as much as we can, but we hear the grumbles."
And the grumblers say that collecting cans no longer is worth the trouble.
In the Heber Springs area, people who collected cans could go to Service Recycling of Heber Springs, turn in 50 pounds of aluminum cans and walk out with $25, said Kendrick Ketchum, the owner. "People could have some walking around money."
Today, if they turned in the same amount of cans, they would walk out with $5.
"People are not happy," said Ketchum, who recommends they take their cans to Express rather than accept his 10-centa-pound price.
Unlike other recyclables, such as plastics and cardboard, where the market has evaporated, the market remains for the ubiquitous can, no matter how little they are worth. After all, the nation's soft drink and beer producers ship 100 billion aluminum cans to thirsty consumers; 54 billion are recycled, which means billions more go unrecycled. Martha Treece of Clinton, a broker of recyclable materials that don't include cans, wonders why more cans aren't turned in.
"It's the easiest thing to recycle," she said.
Alcoa processed 500 million pounds of aluminum cans, the equivalent of 17 billion individual cans, last year at its Knoxville recycling plant, said Gregory Wittbecker, director of corporate recycling strategy for Alcoa. The cans together with other aluminum scrap accounted for 20 percent of the company's aluminum production in 2007, he said.
The price of cans closely tracks the price of virgin aluminum, the benchmark for which is the London Exchange. In May, virgin aluminum reached $3,000 for a metric ton; now it's trading at half that, Wittbecker said. A pound of aluminum cans will always cost slightly less than a pound of virgin aluminum, the reason being is that some aluminum is lost in re-processing aluminum cans back into aluminum sheeting, Wittbecker said.
Nowadays, many cans aren't recycled with an eye toward profit. Cans are among the household recyclables that homeowners in Little Rock and North Little Rock routinely place on their curbs each week. Waste Management Inc., which has the contract in both cities to run the curbside recycling program, has detected no downturn in recyclables the company collects in Little Rock and North Little Rock, company officials said.
"People should do it because it's the right thing to do" for the environment, Treece said. "There will be people who go out of business because they wanted to make money in it. You have to go back to the footprint we want to leave for our future."
Still, not every community has curbside recycling programs, particularly ones in rural areas. Recyclers such as Express and a handful of others in the state fill the void by contracting with smaller operations around the state, such as the one Inman runs. DeWitt figures he has about 80 such operators in six states. He keeps track of them with pins on a wall map. Several are tied to salvage yards; others are small operations tied to separate operations: a wrecker service in Stuttgart or a feed store in Brinkley. Many are like Inman, who relies on his operation to supplement a Navy pension.
If the small dealers have enough volume, DeWitt provides them with a machine that automatically flattens the can. A new flattening machine can cost $15,000, DeWitt said.
Inman, 67, got into the business for health reasons. He started picking up cans for exercise more than 14 years ago. The practice began while the Navy retiree walked to aid his recovery from heart surgery.
"I did a lot of walking," Inman said. "I thought I might as well pick up cans while I'm walking. I really enjoyed it."
Inman parlayed his enjoyment into running an Arkadelphia recycling operation owned by someone else. When it closed, DeWitt persuaded him to open his own center in Dumas about 10 years ago. At the height of the recycling boom, Inman said his business generated $250,000 in annual revenue. It takes about five to six weeks to collect the 5,000 to 7,000 pounds of cans that can make it worth his while to go to North Little Rock. For December, he's collected 600 pounds of aluminum cans so far. It doesn't help that he's cut back the hours of operation to three days a week.
"The low prices are killing us," Inman said. "We've seen downturns, but I've never seen anything like it is right now. I don't know how the smaller dealers are going to survive this."
DeWitt, who has pulled some pins from his wall map, preaches patience.
"It'll be back," DeWitt said. "I just don't know when."
