Cash For Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America

3. Nuisance or Necessity?

N U I S A N C E O R N E C E S S I T Y ? 59 Abe and Sam Levinson were successes. Secondgeneration Jewish immigrants living in Pittsburgh, the two brothers ran a profitable scrap metal yard and rag shop in the city’s Hill District, close to downtown. Their father, James Levinson, had founded the business on Pride Street, starting with a horse and wagon. His grandson Aaron remembers the yard had “all the junk that he could find—old tires and old brass bedsteads, pots and pans, metal of any kind.”1 James passed away in 1917, leaving the business to his sons, who continued to build on their father’s achievements, making the business even more profitable. Within a decade of taking over the family business, however, Abe and Sam had stopped buying and selling scrap iron and rags, opting to close the Pride Street businesses in 1926. Instead , they changed the direction of the firm, opening a new steel fabrication plant at Twenty-third and Josephine Streets on Pittsburgh’s South Side. Even though Levinson’s junk business was very successful , within a few short years of taking over the family business, Abe and Sam abandoned the scrap trade and founded Levinson steel. Why would successful scrap dealers leave the trade as the market for secondary materials was growing?2 James, Abe, and Sam Levinson all enjoyed the opportunities offered by the scrap trade in the early twentieth century. The first two decades of the century marked an extraordinary period of growth for Nuisance or Necessity? 3 59 60 C A S H F O R Y O U R T R A S H scrap dealers as large industry began demanding mass quantities of scrap iron. By 1917, Scientific American reported that the annual business in scrap iron increased from one hundred million to a billion dollars .3 Between 1917 and 1929, demand for iron and steel would further expand the market for scrap iron. The mass consumption of the 1920s brought obsolescence based on style rather than technological function . General Motors pioneered the concept of the annual model in automobile sales, and manufacturers of washing machines, gas ranges, and other durable goods added stylistic considerations to the marketing and design of goods whose useful lives would otherwise span many years.4 A consumption ethic based on style rather than functionality spurred disposal of durable goods. Thousands of junk shops and yards welcomed millions of mass-produced metal goods that could be resold as secondhand appliances or processed as scrap. In 1900, 5.1 million gross tons of ferrous scrap were sold on the market, mostly to domestic sources; eight years later that figure rose to 8.6 million gross tons, and consumption in World War I led to the sale of 12.7 billion gross tons in 1917.5 The automobile graveyard became a new, specialized junkyard where customers could purchase obsolete automobiles for scrap or purchase individual parts off of junked automobiles in order to repair other automobiles. In 1920, Detroit’s business directory featured listings for thirty-six automobile salvage yards, and by the end of the decade, automobile graveyards were common in American cities by the end of the 1920s. Chicago’s scrap businesses increased from 140 to 417 between 1890 and 1917.6 By the end of World War I, the market for scrap iron and steel had made wealthy men of many dealers. The collection of small firms built by immigrants over the past four decades had grown into a flexible network of brokers, dealers, peddlers, and scavengers, with the largest firms enjoying international trade and relationships with the nation’s largest industrial producers. In 1918, journalist George Manlove exclaimed that the iron and steel scrap industry “has risen from nothing to a position of full dignity and is just now coming into its own, a recognized member of the iron and steel family.”7 The Crookedest of Any Business While Manlove was correct about the industry’s rapid rise, his assertion that it had risen to a position of full dignity was off the mark. The hundreds of new scrap dealers competing to N U I S A N C E O R N E C E S S I T Y ? 61 sell their goods to a smaller number of industrial customers encountered conflicts relating to their business practices and handling...