Southern Girls Scrap Metal...My foray into the world of metal recycling

There it was. The scary lean-to on the back of my grandmother's house that my grandfather had used as a shed when I was a child. Two decades ago it wasn't so scary as Grandpa opened the door several times a day to take out tools and steer the big blue wheelbarrow out of the corner to use in his vegetable garden. I was still little when he stopped the wheelbarrow in the back of the garden, went inside and never touched the garden again. The shed began to fall apart and all sorts of creepy-crawlies took up residence. When he died four years ago the shed had been opened only once and that was by my super-brave big brother in order to store some plastic-wrapped air conditioners. But a few weeks ago I stood before it, the peeling white-painted door in a stand-off against me. I knew the inside needed to be cleaned out as part of the entire clear-out-the-house effort and I had a plan.

Gripping a bug fogger tightly in one hand I kicked the crumbling door a couple of times to ensure any angry animal that might have decided to live inside was fully aware of my intent to enter then flicked the latch and let the door swing open on the one hinge that is still intact. In one swift motion I activated the fogger, threw it inside, slammed the door and ran for all I was worth. It was not dignified but it was effective. Four hours later when I was confident the bug fogger had done its duty and was sufficiently aired out, I donned a pair of my husband's jeans, a very tight belt, long-sleeved shirt and thick shoes, slipped on some work gloves and marched into battle. The shed was filled with a collection of unidentifiable tools and implements, glass coffee jars filled with rusting nails and the tower of air conditioners. I saw one thing: metal.

My husband and I had devised a plan to get rid of the old stuff clogging my late grandparents' home and it centered on the one substance this shed had in abundance. We were going to go metal scraping. Now, for any that have met me, those words are far beyond anything that would ever seem like something I would do, but I was feeling adventurous and eager to get in on this environmentally-friendly trend. So here I was collecting metal.

An hour later I had pulled everything out of the shed and made a precarious pile in the grass behind the house. Old saws, wrenches, crowbars and fishing equipment sat among cords and cables and things I didn't recognize. Then I turned to the tangled jungle that used to be Grandpa's garden and went at it with a pair of old hedge clippers. Two hours later I had liberated that old blue wheelbarrow along with another red one, two abandoned gardening tools and a few rolls of chainlink fencing. I thought I was going to die but I had a pretty impressive pile of stuff.

I wasn't done, though. Next door a team was engaged in revamping the house, peeling off siding and emptying an old garage. Sidling up to the fence I told the leader that I was planning a trip to the recycling plant and if he wanted to save himself a trip he could just put all of the metal in the backyard and we would take care of it. With a smile I went in the house and took a very long shower. The next day I glanced out the window. The metal fairy had visited! My scrap pile had grown and so did my excitement at my impending scraping adventure.

That afternoon Chris and I borrowed my mother-in-law's pickup truck, laid the backseat in our Explorer down and filled them up. The trip across town to the recycling plant was a bit hair-raising. I just knew that any second the bungee cords we had used to strap down the load in the back of the pickup were going to spring loose and sheets of aluminum and heavy bars of iron were going to go flying across the highway and into the windshields of unsuspecting cars around us. Fortunately we made it to the plant without any catastrophes.

When we arrived at Smith Iron and Metal, Inc. (on Bell's Road) we were directed to a bay in which a man asked us what type of metal we had. Since our answer was "ummmm, several" and our load consisted of two car-fulls he told us to head outside and to the right "toward the big orange magnet".  He was not kidding. The giant magnet was swinging from a machine I could only call a crane (though I'm sure that's not the correct term) and was gathering the piles of metal other people threw from the back of their cars. Our little caravan pulled up to the area we were shown by the helpful men working the yard and Chris started unloading. I stayed in the truck with Avalon, staring open-mouthed out the windows at the show around me.

The huge yard was filled with machines sorting the enormous piles of metal. Ahead of us the largest machine of all took the scrap up a conveyor belt into a processor and spit out shiny silver shreds. I referenced the movie Mannequin but Chris insisted it was similar to something out of Superman. When all of the metal we had brought was collected on the ground the magnet swung around and started transferring it to the mountain behind it. Little cars that looked like something from Star Wars took pieces and brought them to smaller mountains. Soon everything was sorted, the appliances in one place, the siding in another, the tools buried elsewhere. When everything was finished the men directed us back through the bay.

We stopped in the bay, apparenlty on a huge scale, and waited for the man that had told us to go to the magnet originally to calculate the difference in the weights of our vehicles after unloading the metal versus when we first arrived. He handed us a slip of paper that detailed what we had brought and what it was worth, thanked us and told us to drive around.

At the front of the building Chris brought the slip to a cashier and was presented with cash. Now that we knew the ropes we went back to the house, loaded up again, and went back. After everything was counted we had made $65, not bad for getting rid of some useless old stuff. The yard was loud and dirty but mind-blowing in its enormity and efficiency. I was positively amazed at the glittery bales of processed metal that were stacked beside the building and the precision with which the men manuevered their machinery. I admit to being slightly terrified that the magnet would go rogue and I would end up in the truck flying over the yard only to be deposited into the shredder where I would have to hold Avalon in my teeth like a lion and scramble down the conveyor belt like, as I acknowledged earlier, the girl in Mannequin. Happily this didn't happen and we drove away from the recycling plant with a little more money in our pockets, a little less stuff to contend with and a whole new perspective on environmentalism.

I went into this adventure with very little preparation. There are many people who do this frequently, making a pretty decent living collecting the cast-offs of other people and turning them into cash at the plants. I know now that there are ways to organize the metal that will increase your cash, which I plan to utilize if I ever do this again. There are some fabulous Hubs on the topic, too, if you want to do some further research!

Happy recycling!