|
Ardent Listener
Administrator
USA
4841 Posts |
 Posted - 08/11/2006 : 18:15:59
|
You must be logged in to see this link.
Monday, March 20, 2006
By Don Lee Los Angeles Times
Advertisement
YONGKANG, China -- About once a month, Ying Guangwu tucks some cash inside his black shirt, slings a knapsack over his back and hits the road.
The square-jawed 33-year-old doesn’t always know where he’s headed or when he’ll return. But he knows exactly what he’s looking for: tons of scrap metal.
A pen-shaped magnet in his pocket helps him determine the quality of some metals. In December, Ying spent two weeks in Guangdong Province, a 20 hours’ bus drive away, rummaging through factory warehouses and scrap yards. He bought 10 tons of tin ingots, lead cables and imported scrap, shipping them by trucks to his wife, Lin Li. She sorted the stuff inside their two-story home before reselling it to metal traders and recyclers in town.
Ying and Lin, high school graduates, earned about $25,000 last year -- more than what many Chinese doctors and lawyers make.
“I didn’t want to do this when I was young. It seemed stupid to me,” says the second-generation scrap collector, whose sun-burnt face bears the mark of 10 years on China’s dusty streets. But his father took the right path, Ying says. “This is turning trash into treasure.”
China’s voracious appetite for metals is convulsing the world. It has led to economic booms in some nations and crime waves in others by so-call urban miners who steal metals from houses and public buildings. China’s runaway economy needs the metals to build railroads, office towers, cars and appliances.
The Middle Kingdom is now the world’s biggest consumer of copper, lead, zinc, iron ore, steel and aluminum.
China’s hunger has boosted mineral-rich nations, from copper-laden Chile to Australia, which has vast iron deposits. Prices of new and used lead, copper, nickel and other metals have tripled or more in the last few years, triggering a worldwide scramble for the commodities.
Chinese state-owned mining companies are prowling the planet for fresh supplies, while armies of people like Ying and Lin spend their days hunting for castaway metals from typewriter letterheads to 30-foot-long aluminum missile casings.
Nowhere in China is the craving for metals more evident than Yongkang. This landlocked city in southeast China’s Zhejiang Province calls itself the hardware capital. With a population of about 530,000, Yongkang boasts some 10,000 hardware businesses, nearly all of them private family enterprises.
Yongkang is legendary for itinerant tinkerers who mended pots and pans for a living. Today, countless homes, storefronts, junkyards and factories carry on that tradition, buying, selling and recycling more than 600,000 tons of scrap metal every year. The city’s streets are teeming with tractors, trucks and bicycles hauling metal rods, coils and sheets.
Many head for Yongkang’s scrap-metal market, an outdoor bazaar. More than 400 garage-sized warehouses are filled with scrap collected from across the world: crushed beer cans from Japan, fuel pumps and used car parts from the West, air-conditioning condensers from northeast China.
(Begin optional trim)
On a recent afternoon, Ying Sufang sat stooped outside Stall 287, meticulously separating printers’ lead pieces no bigger than grains of rice.
The lead was shipped to her from her husband, who was foraging for scrap about 1,000 miles away -- not far from the Vietnam border. Last year Lin and her husband earned more than $7,000, their best take in 10 years.
“That’s not bad,” says the 44-year-old.
But it has come at a price. Ying, who is unrelated to Ying Guangwu, grumbles about the grimy, sometimes punishing work.
She has never become accustomed to her husband being away for long stretches. He has been gone for the last month, leaving her and their middle-school daughter at home.
“I chose this business because 60 percent to 70 percent of people in our village are doing this,” she says. “This is how we make money .... I don’t know what else to do.”
(End optional trim)
Across the Pacific, George Adams Jr. is also cashing in on one of the greatest commodity booms in modern times. He is the owner of Adams Steel, a scrap metal dealer in Anaheim, Calif., that shreds used cars, washing machines and dryers down to the size of a wallet. The crushed metal is loaded onto trucks and containers that are shipped to traders across the world. Much of it winds up in China, in the hands of millions of scrap traders like Ying.
Adams’ annual sales now exceed $100 million. Last year he bought scrap yards in Southern California, installed more shredding equipment and added 70 employees to boost his workforce to 500.
He has a lot of competition. Thieves have ripped apart ballpark fences in Des Moines and stripped copper from cathedral domes in Cleveland. In Buenos Aires, people have made away with bronze plaques on boulevards and copper wires from utility companies. And from England to India to Malaysia, tens of thousands of manhole covers have vanished.
“They’re taking copper out of brand-new houses in Southern California,” says Carl Clark, Adams Steel’s plant manager. Such stolen copper pipes and wires don’t need to be recycled; they are bundled together and sold to brokers who send them all over the world, where they fetch triple the prices of a few years ago.
“An actual copper penny today is worth more as scrap than its face value,” Clark says. (The one-cent piece today is made of zinc and copper.)
The crime spree has resulted in deaths as people have fallen down manholes, and has caused such concern that countries like Argentina placed restrictions on the export of scrap metals.
The price of iron ore, a major ingredient in steel, jumped 71 percent in the last year alone, sharply cutting steel producers’ margins. But with China accounting for one-fourth of the world’s steel production last year -- and half of all iron ore imports -- Beijing is demanding that iron ore exporters put a lid on prices.
“The Chinese are flexing their market power,” says Ruth Stroppiana, an economist at Moody’s Economy.com in Sydney. “The China factor,” she adds, “has been absolutely huge” for Australia, Brazil, Chile and other resource-rich nations.
Chinese towns like Yongkang also have benefited, although the metal boom has taken a heavy toll on China’s environment and workers. Pollution-spewing metal factories have degraded rivers and lands.
In Yongkang, government officials have shut down dozens of the 1,000-plus smelters in the city, say plant managers. Authorities also have toughened rules on imported scrap metals, prohibiting car motors, for example, if they have oil in them, says Du Huanzheng, a metals expert at Zhejiang Institute of Industry and Commerce.
Still, China’s imports of scrap metal surged nearly 30 percent last year, Du says, and the trend is not likely to abate soon, least of all in Yongkang.
(Optional add end)
Ying Zhiang’s family has been in the scrap metal business for several generations. About 20 years ago, Ying collected scrap as he traveled the country fixing scales for merchants. “Even though products can get old and useless, the metal in them still has value,” he said.
Now 52, Ying runs Yongya Copper Industrial Co., one of China’s leading copper producers and recyclers. His company ships 100 tons of the metal a day. He buys most of his scrap copper from dealers in town and the nearby port city of Taizhou.
In Yongya’s warehouse, red-capped workers moved bales of scrap wires, and others in street clothes picked up the smallest of loose copper on the ground. Ying says he is considering collecting scrap himself again, because prices have soared beyond belief. A decade ago, he was buying metric ton of copper in China for about $625. Now it costs ten times that amount.
“The numbers are out of this world,” he says.
________________________
If you can conceive it and believe it, you can achieve it. -Napoleon Hill
|
|
Where scap yards are gold mines.
Forum Locked
