BONNYVILLE – If you have old metal equipment lying around that you should have brought to the landfill years ago, there may be a new incentive to clean up your shop and get paid for it instead.
Inland Steel Products is a scrap metal recycling company based in the prairies that officially opened its gates on a new operation in Bonnyville in January.
The company’s website has a list from A to Z outlining the numerous materials accepted at the new Bonnyville facility. The list ranges from air conditioners, to aluminum, to bike frames, brass fittings, barbeques, Christmas lights, dry cars, farm equipment, stainless steel, X-ray plates and Zinc materials, among many other items.
From one pound of scrap metal to 1 million pounds, Inland Steel prides itself on being able to offer customers solutions for metal recycling, Matt Ditlove, President of Inland Steel Products, told Lakeland This Week.
With six locations spread across Alberta and Saskatchewan, the three-generation business is bringing a new culture to metal and industrial recycling. The company shows that scrap metal does not have to equate to an overflowing junk yard that leaves your vehicle with a flat tire.
“The perception of scrap yards has really changed,” Ditlove said. “One of our company's mission statements is really to change the perception of what our industry is. Before you think of scrap yards, and it would be old junk yards with mud, old equipment, not professional staff – and that's just how the industry always was.”
Ditlove said some of the success Inland Steel has found comes from turning its sites into world class metal recycling facilities with state-of-the-art equipment.
“When you go to our Bonnyville site, you walk in the door and it doesn't feel like you're going to an old junk yard,” he said, adding that scrap is quickly sorted and transferred to a main hub facility to be processed without sitting in the yard for an extended period.
For materials brought into the Bonnyville site, those items will likely be taken to Lloydminster where metals are broken down and shipped all over the world by railcar.
The new location in Bonnyville also features a heated drive-thru scale, a paved lot, immediate payment, and monitors for radio-active materials, which Ditlove said all adds to the customer experience and professionalism.
However, the newest feeder yard in Bonnyville is far from how the family business started in Saskatoon back in 1967.
“My grandfather, Dennis Ditlove, started with a pickup truck and no building,” he said. At the time, the business sold new steel and would pick up customers’ salvage as well.
Over the last six decades, the metal recycling portion of Inland Steel’s business model has continued to grow.
“About 10 years ago, we made a decision to stay focused on what we were experts in,” said Ditlove. “There are some locations that we do still offer new steel in, Calgary and Swift Current, Sask., but most locations are 100 per cent metal recycling.”
Over the last five years, the company has been expanding its footprint across western Canada and building Inland Steel facilities, like the one in Bonnyville. “But we've really stayed focused in Saskatchewan and perfecting our practice and having a custom solution for the public, for industrial accounts and other scrap,” added Ditlove.
Prior to opening an Inland Steel location in Bonnyville, the company was already working with smaller scrap yards in the area but was not able to pull in the levels of metal materials it had hoped to from the area. A decision was made to acquire Lakeland Metals.
“We were buying scrap from that area through other scrap dealers before, which we ended up acquiring before we built the new facility,” explained Ditlove.
“We had an idea and connections in the marketplace and we're buying from other companies, but from a logistics standpoint, we couldn't be as competitive as we wanted to because we didn’t have an actual location there.”
Through its Bonnyville and Lloydminster locations, Inland Steel is hoping to draw business in from Cold Lake, Lac La Biche, St. Paul and as far away as Fort McMurray, servicing the whole northeast region through its bins, collection sites, mobile metal scrap pick-ups and shearing.
The decision to open a feeder yard in Bonnyville was “to expand our geographic footprint and to fill a gap in that northeast Alberta market and that was the town that we decided that we wanted to be in,” said Ditlove.
Changing times
The growth in metal recycling and the expansion of companies like Inland Steel Products has been sparked by a new reality of the steel industry – recycling metal has become easier to do through technological advances and is more environmentally sustainable than mining metals from the ground.
“From an environmental and efficiency standpoint, steel mills across the world have transferred to Electric Arc Furnaces, which has caused the demand for scrap metal to go crazy,” Ditlove said.
Over the last decade, the increase in using scrap metal as raw material for new steel products is growing the demand globally.
“Without scrap metal yards, there would be no materials to make cars,” Inland Steel’s president explained. “That's a critical part of the whole raw materials steelmaking, aluminum, copper, commodity supply chain and the main input of all that stuff. So, without collection facilities and scrap metal yards doing the kind of work that they do, it wouldn't be possible to run the country.”
Ditlove added that right now, “There is a big shift in North America steel manufacturing. For the first time probably since the 1940s, that there has been major investment in Canada, U.S. and Mexico into new steel mill capacity in North America.”
In the past, scrap metal products were often leaving North America and going to other countries to be recycled, however, things are beginning to change.
Ditlove has seen first-hand a shift towards self-sufficiency in the North American steel making market.
"I don't think they're going to rely on other nations and other continents to get their steel from like they have in the past. I think COVID changed a lot of that,” he said.
A shortage of scrap metal during and following the pandemic has had a benefit for people bringing in metal materials, who have seen the prices for their scrap continue to increase over the last five years.
Whether the high prices for scrap metal will continue to increase is up for debate, but experts agree that COVID-19 and supply chain issues have played a significant role in making scrap metal prices where they are today.
Preventing purchases of stolen metals
With the theft of catalytic converters and other valuable metals on the rise across Canada, Ditlove acknowledged the importance of being vigilant to prevent the purchase of stolen materials.
“We were probably one of the only scrap yards in Western Canada to have our own security department, which includes people that have spent time with the RCMP or local police services,” said Ditlove.
For Inland Steel Products making sure they are only purchasing metal from reputable companies or reputable sellers is a priority.
“We are constant communication with local law enforcement and they're letting us know if things are stolen and not to buy them,” said the company’s president. “We are doing a lot of due diligence on the front end.”
Ditlove added that every Inland Steel site in Alberta follows the province’s Scrap Metal Dealers and Recyclers Identification Act and report metal purchases on a daily basis.
