Green Guy Recycling Center Affected by the Economy

For our project Tina Phan and I decided to visit Green Guy recycling center in San Marcos, Texas. I contacted Jeremy, the operations manager and he was eager to set up an interview on the same day.

Jeremy gave us a tour of the site and introduced us to two dinosaur size piles that looked like, as he put it, junk. He explained that they were divided into ferrous and nonferrous metals. Ferrous metals are metals like cooper that can be sold and bought. It is metals like these that bring in the most revenue for recycling centers.

We followed him to huge shed, which was the only place with a roof. That is were the workers spend most of their time taking apart and categorizing metals. We met Danny, who looked like he had just taken a bath in car oil. He organizes brass all day and has worked for the company for five years. I was overwhelmed, I had no idea what hard work went into any of it. Jeremy ran into his office and came out with a lengthy list of metals categorized by grade and price.

Towards the end of the shed were wall to wall boxes of metal bails, crushed by a machine that works much like Wall-e, wrapped in plastic and tape ready for shipping. Jeremy explained that they have been there for months maybe years. The prices of metal have fallen so low, shipping to their buyers over seas, is not worth it. So they hold them and wait for a favorable market change.

Even though the recycling center is struggling it has not laid off any workers. It takes months and months to learn the many grades of metal. They consider the workers they have highly skilled and costly to replace. For now they have survived on projects like taking apart buildings. They operate during the day so they don’t use much electricity and they make their own bins to store materials. They also make money from plastic and aluminum cans. Luckily the demand for recycling businesses is high because of the growing green trend.