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After all, scrap metal dealers spend their working lives handling other people's junk. For decades, the recycling trade - like farming - has been handed down from generation to generation. "It's not the type of industry that people are going to go to college for - it's in your blood," said Mechanic, who grew up working in his father's Milwaukee scrap metal business. But the process of handling junk - known these days as recyclables - has been transformed in the last two decades, as second- and third-generation scrap metal dealers find themselves barely able to compete in the increasingly high-tech, global metal recycling business. Beginning in the 1980s, more people and businesses began recycling for environmental and economic reasons. The newfound interest arrived just as U.S. factories that used scrap metal as the raw material to make everything from engines to farm equipment began shutting down amid a recession that forever changed the nation's - and this region's - manufacturing landscape. Suddenly, there were no buyers for a huge glut of scrap metal that was building up at scrap yards throughout the nation. That led to scrap metal dealers combining and forming large corporations to better handle the abundance of cheap metal. Scrap dealers also began to look overseas for new markets. Meanwhile, individual and family-owned dealers struggled to stay competitive. "Things are so different than they were years ago," Mechanic said. "And it happens so quickly. You have to react a lot faster than you used to." These days, with an uncertain economy and ever-larger competitors, Mechanic said, it is increasingly difficult for a single business to survive in the market. Last fall, after 30 years of going it alone, Mechanic sat down to lunch with his main competitors. "We need each other's help," he bluntly told Art Arnstein and Steve Lewinsky. Eight months later, in March, Mechanic, Arnstein and Lewinsky merged and formed United Milwaukee Scrap LLC in Milwaukee. Together they are trying to keep alive a heritage of recycling in Milwaukee that stretches back to the early part of the 20th century. By its simplest definition, a scrap recycler takes in metal - old refrigerators, stoves, furnaces, nearly anything containing metal - breaks it down, separates it, stockpiles it and waits for a foundry, smelter or mill to buy it. But there's a lot more that goes into the process. United Milwaukee Scrap has about 40 employees - no job was cut with the merger - on four acres across three processing locations in the Milwaukee area. They have dozens of trucks, trailers, shredders, shearers, cranes and cutters. They have a device that looks like a handgun that detects the composition of a piece of metal down to thousandths of a percent, so they can categorize it by grade. At the United Milwaukee Scrap site along W. Fond du Lac Ave. in Milwaukee, about 15 enormous piles of all types of metal castoffs sit both indoors and out. Though some piles look indiscriminately tossed together, each is actually carefully grouped by size and alloy composition. "It's all about chemistry," Arnstein said. Defective tire rims rejected by their manufacturers create one pile. Mangled shopping carts form another 30-foot-tall cone. A crane picks over a pile of sharp metal strips in another spot. Huge trucks bring in a tangled mess of truck grills, bathtubs and kitchen sinks. Later, that material is shipped out in small squares that can slide easily into a foundry furnace. A sign advertises a 45-cents-a-pound special for aluminum cans. In the back, helmet-clad, safety goggle-wearing workers in overalls feed cans to a noisy conveyor belt that spits the compacted aluminum into a metal container. And this is just a sampling of a single day's work, adding up to millions of pounds of metal that gets processed by the company each year. All this activity is made possible by the partners' pool of resources, which has extended the reach of what each could have accomplished alone. "Whether it's buying a pair of gloves or an insurance plan," Arnstein said, "we're always looking at ways to streamline our processes and make things more efficient." Each has a specialtyWith their three distinct personalities, skills and backgrounds, Arnstein, Lewinsky and Mechanic each bring something special to the table. But they feed off one another's knowledge of and enthusiasm for the business. "We've been through it all in this business," Arnstein said. "We've been in the trenches." With sky blue eyes and silver hair, Mechanic, 48, is the comedian of the bunch. "My mother told me to go to school and become an MD," he said. "So I did - a metal dealer." Mechanic went into the scrap metal business with his father, who had familiarized himself with the business as a bookkeeper for Milwaukee Scrap Metal in the 1960s. Father and son had no forklifts or cranes, so they loaded the sinks, hubcaps, pots and pans into barrels and moved them around by hand. "It was a lot of manual labor," he said. "But there was no other option. It was how it was done in those days." After taking over for his father, Mechanic's businesses - Standard Scrap Metal and Milwaukee Scrap Metal Co. - outgrew five buildings before settling at the old Geiser's Potato Chips building on W. Burleigh St., which was adjacent to Arnstein and Lewinsky on W. Fond du Lac Ave. Before the recent merger, Arnstein and Lewinsky had already joined forces - twice. The two formed Pro Recycling in 1994 but sold the business in 1998 to an out-of-state recycling corporation. After the sale, Arnstein and Lewinsky started again from scratch, forming Start Recycling in 1999. Arnstein's wife's grandfather was a peddler, a primitive recycler who collected paper and rags with a horse-drawn cart. But Arnstein, 56, is a member of the new breed of business-savvy recyclers. With a degree in marketing from Milwaukee Area Technical College, Arnstein brings customer relations expertise to the partnership. This is more crucial to the scrap metal business than one might think. Arnstein regularly communicates with customers as far away as Russia, China and India, where the market for metal is far greater than the domestic demand. The company estimates that 30% to 40% of its business comes from overseas. Lewinsky, whose boyish face and slightly curly hair make him look younger than his 39 years, is the youngest and quietest of the three. But his recycling background goes back the furthest. His grandfather started a horse-and-buggy peddler service in 1908, and his father inherited the recycling business in the 1950s. Lewinsky first operated a crane at age 17 and hauled, torched or sorted metals for his father every summer and between semesters at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's business school. "I can't see myself doing anything else," Lewinsky said. "I'll probably do it until I'm dead." Years ago, Lewinsky's father could be successful with minimal machinery and a little family help. Today, Lewinsky thinks his partnership with Arnstein and Mechanic is imperative to keeping the family business alive. "The processing part has become very involved, so we're forced to be as efficient as we can to make a profit in this business," Lewinsky said. "We're working with very sophisticated and expensive equipment. There are different processes for steel, for aluminum and for copper, and we all bring additional capability and know-how to the table." Arnstein agrees with his partner's reasoning. "We had to combine our manpower and brainpower," he said. "It's
not a one-man business any longer."
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United
Recycling LLC
Who:
Rick Mechanic, Art Arnstein and Steve Lewinsky
formed a partnership in March and share a family
tradition of Milwaukee recycling that stretches
back to the beginning of the last century.