Scrap Metal King of Houston Welcomes Harvey Recyclables

SEATTLE (Waste Advantage): It isn’t easy to see a bright side to a hurricane’s destruction. But in the mountains of metal piling up in Dennis Laviage’s scrap yard, a sense of a silver lining emerges in the sheen of aluminum.

The Dallas Morning News reports Laviage is better known as the scrap metal king of Houston, and after Harvey, he had to order a new half-million-dollar cutting machine just to keep up with the work. It can’t get here soon enough, said the owner of C&D Scrap Metal Recyclers.

In his yard stand mountains of bed frames, refrigerators, heating ducts, stoves, twisted metal roofs and other storm debris from Harvey. Mud-caked automobiles arrive every day.

So he needs a new cutting machine to pair with the other one in his yard that just sliced through an old Brinks truck like it was a watermelon. “This is all hurricane material,” Laviage, 62, said as he stood watching his employees cut and smash junk into tight silvery squares of metal.

“I’d say business is up about 35 percent,” said Laviage, who said he usually processes about a thousand tons of scrap a week.

Most of the increase is from stuff he wouldn’t normally be getting, such as refrigerators. Unfortunately for him, some of them still contain food. He’s sympathetic to people rushing to get bad refrigerators out of their homes. But by the time a fridge full of food gets to his yard, “it’s a biohazard,” he said. “I’m not equipped to be a disposal for old food.”

The Houston native has been in the scrap metal business for nearly 40 years. He’s seen hurricanes come and go, but nothing as destructive as the storm that has hobbled southeast Texas over the last month. “I’ve never seen water rise like it rose this time in my entire life,” he said.

Laviage grew up in the Meyerland neighborhood of Houston, which has now flooded three times in three years. “I play poker over there with three guys,” he said. “They all lost their homes.”

He lives near downtown Houston at the top of a layered 15-foot slope. “If the water had come up another 2 feet it would have been in my house.”

He’s not sure there’s enough space in area landfills to handle all the city’s trash left by Harvey. “There’s an overabundance,” he said. Irma Reyes, a spokeswoman with the city’s solid waste management department, said there is enough landfill space in the Houston-Galveston region to handle all the debris.

Courtesy: https://wasteadvantagemag.com