American Scrap

An old-school industry globalizes

From The New Yorker
January 14, 2008

The Foot of Hawkins Street scrapyard sits on twenty-seven acres of industrial parkland, at the edge of Newark's old Ironbound District. The yard's metallic topography—large piles of scrap metal, mainly of steel, but also of copper, aluminum, and stainless steel—can be seen from the West Side highrises of Manhattan. Sometimes, when the sun hits the piles, they glitter like honey-coated breakfast cereal. The yard also contains a range of machines used in the deconstruction business, including a shear, a baler, and two overhead cranes, which work through the piles of metal with the stately rhythm of large browsing ruminants. The air holds a tangy but not unpleasant metallic essence, and is periodically rent with the shriek of shattering steel, heard over a thudding backbeat of mangled appliances that the cranes drop into piles—food for the nearby shredder. If you listen closely, you can hear the tinkling of the "shred"—the fist-size hunks of metal that emerge from the shredder—raining down on the shred pile. That's a comforting sound to people in scrap, because it sounds like money.

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Copyright © John Seabrook 2008. All rights reserved

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