Miller on scrap: The corporatization of the US, Canadian recycling industry

When I started in the scrap business many years ago as a rookie trader in Luria’s Cleveland office, I saw an industry composed of family-owned businesses stretching across a great industrial nation. The men and women who owned these businesses were of a true entrepreneurial breed. The families who founded these recycling concerns at the turn of the last century worked their way up from rag collectors and garbage handlers. And they built a multibillion-dollar industry. It was a great example of a free market. Today, ferrous and non-ferrous scrap are a true natural resource, and its availability has helped the North American steel industry evolve into what it is today.

The leaders of the scrap industry in the era after World War II were quite powerful. They worked with the steel industry on an equal level, and sought pricing for their products that had to be fair for both sides. If it wasn’t, they did not flinch and would make their case for their point of view. I remember one instance when a mill told Lou Miller, the owner of Columbia Iron and Metal, to bid the Fisher Body Industrial bundles at too cheap of a price given market conditions. He responded by buying them for his own account at a higher price. After that, we could tell what the scrap market would do the next month by driving by Columbia’s Girard, Ohio, yard and viewing the piles of scrap. I cannot imagine this could happen today.