Originally Posted by
Hemochromatosis
Found this forum while studying for my boards. 26/yo male from Atlanta. Started scrapping a few summers ago when the price of steel was around .14 - .15/lb. Started purchasing those junk cars from Craigslist. Lol, I used to call AAA and tell them I need to take the car home, but redirect them to the scrap yards - well that ended quick, since this is against their company policy. So, I had to change up the strategy and had to bring them home. Fortunately, the local scrap yard isn't more than 3 miles from where I live, however towing agencies were charing roughly $25 for hook-up and a certain price/mile. Well, that was $40 right there out of the pocket for the next several cars. Not having a tow-dolly was a huge drawback, but that's ok.
From there, I found out scrapping cars as a whole was stupid. The car had other parts that would also bring in the $$ (ie catalytic converter, alternator, wheels, etc etc) but I didn't have the right tools to get the parts out. i found that removing the CC isn't too hard. got a saw and was sawing away at a cc for a toyota previa which i had purchased for $400, lol - well the car had an aftermarket cc, and apparently those are absolute crap. i got a mere $5 for the cc, excluding the price for scrapping the van - good times. I really enjoyed the rush of travelling through Atlanta, meeting car owners, negotiating with them, purchasing car, scrapping, rinse & repeating. It was so bad, that I almost got in trouble at my job a few times for not keeping up with company standards, but when calculating my take home/day from scrapping vs my salary, the former just seemed more worth my time.
Moving on, I wanted to know where these scrappers were taking their material to...as in who was buying their scrap? Doing more research I found out there's a steel plant 15-20 minutes north of where I live by the name of GerduAmeriSteel (GAS). Driving to see it, I was blown away by their operation, and lol while driving to them, I was introduced to another popular scrap yard by the name of Schnitzer Steel. Wow...these yards are just something else - the piles of cars, scrap, I saw it all. Most awesome thing I've ever seen.
I met a lady who was a buyer for a yard, who will remain anonymous since it's also well known in Atlanta, and I guess her seeing my fuel/desire/motivation to get a piece of the action, spilled some beans on how to be successful in the game. I realized, I had no idea/club what I was doing. From there, things slowed down dramatically, the price of steel dropped down to single digits to almost .03/lb. The minute steel dropped down to single digits, car scrapping for me came to an end, there was no more profit with it. I started doing more research and came about a grade of steel known as HMS which stands for heavy metal steel. I started to broker deals, but it was crap. The amount of greed and long broker lines made it impossible to ever close a deal. I was fortunate, to one day realize I found a buyer in India for HMS and a legit seller of HMS in the states, from NYC. Fate had it, that 3 weeks before Christmas of 2009, myself and 191 others were laid off. My family and I booked a trip back to our motherland so I could personally meet this buyer and build a formal relationship with him. The trip was booked for end of February. Shortly after Christmas, while browsing and doing more research, I came across a place in India, by the name of Alang - the capital of cargo vessel destruction. Alang is a long strip along the coastline of India where there are hundreds of yards, where buyers purchase decomissioned cargo vessels for cash. Strip them down to their bare essentials, and sell them to large smelters in India or anybody else.
Luck, just happened to work out for me, where the day I came to visit, a yard owner made history in Alang, where he purchased the largest vessel till date. A 82,000 metric ton vessel by the name of "Knock Nevis". It was purchased for a "mere" $40,000,000 USD, and the kicker...in cash. We were fortunate enough to where I was able to enter a vessel that was getting broken down. Some of the pictures are from the top deck of the vessel. You can see how far the coastline is and how the boats are just lined up getting torn apart. The trip also made me value the importance of proper protocols on scapping. These workers are working with a mere torch on cutting through the vessel. There is no proper sanitation procedure, I can't imagine the increasing cases of asbestosis exposure in that area. Look at the picture with the dog, the oil from the ships is mixing with the sand of the beach, and the water of the ocean - ugh...
Anyways, the initial investment to purchase land to start a yard in that area immediately knocked my dreams down - $10,000,000 USD. However, the trip was a blast. I got to learn more about metal and it's intricate journey of getting scrapped and reused, and when talking to people about it, I love telling the story. I came back home, applied to grad school, and now I'm 2 weeks away from taking my boards, which will determine what I end up doing for the next 40-50 years of my life. I want to get back into scrapping, because I know, I can be successful in it since I have the motivation, desire, and awesome social skills. Being a broke graduate student, is also a very good motivator. I've included pics of my trip...
Edit: ok had to remove the pics since the forum's retarded policy of not being able to post pics since im new...any way around this...epic thread just went to fail
