Stars & Stripes Scrap Metal

Our Origin Story

Most people don’t see the value in scrap metal. They see the rusty appliance gathering dust in the garage, the old car sitting on cinder blocks, the pile of leftover copper pipe from a job site. They see junk. Something past its useful life. Something to get rid of.

Our owner, George, saw it that way for a while, too. He just didn’t realize he was talking about himself.

George had always been an entrepreneur. His instinct to find opportunity was sharp from a young age. The problem was, it was aimed in the wrong direction for most of his life.

For decades, he had run-ins with the law and cycled in and out of prison on a variety of charges. He even earned a nickname, Time Bomb, from being locked down in a jail cell 20 hours a day.

It wasn’t until two chance encounters that everything changed.

The first was with a prison volunteer who invited George to a weekday church service. It ended up being just the two of them. Five words hit differently than anything he’d heard before.