ReNu Recycling Grows With Green Awareness

REDFORD TOWNSHIP -- To look for proof that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, look no further than ReNu Recycling Inc. at 12065 Telegraph Road.

It's a rough old brick building, surrounded by piles of what looks like trash -- miscellaneous piles and huge boxes of scrap metal, and some recognizable busted-up appliances, electric motors, generators, refrigerator compressors. You wouldn't dare go barefoot around here -- little hunks of metal are all over the floor. Inside, brawny employees wrestle rusty 500-pound radiators out of the back of old pickup trucks to be weighed and sold as scrap. Off to the side, other employees sort metals and chop up the hunks that are too big for easy transport.

But in the back of the building, it's a different story. Inside, Norbert Wierszewski sits in a busy office he shares with his daughter (and, as a portable crib attests, occasionally his 2 1/2-year-old granddaughter), a big-screen TV tuned to Bloomberg market coverage, as he expounds on the clean, green beauty of recycling. Scrapyards may not be pretty, but when you listen to Wierszewski talk, it's a beautiful place.

Did you know Americans toss out enough aluminum every month to rebuild our entire commercial airline fleet? Yep.

And tossing out one aluminum can -- one can! -- wastes as much energy as filling the same can half-full of gasoline and pouring it on the ground.

Or think bigger: Recycling one ton of aluminum saves as much energy as the typical American home uses over 10 years. And recycling just one car saves 2,500 pounds of iron ore, 1,400 pounds of coal and 120 pounds of limestone.

ReNu was founded in 2001, but Wierszewski says he's been recycling since he was 12. "My dad was a toolmaker at Ford, and he taught me wha copper, brass, aluminum, stainless, all the metals were, at a very young age," he said. "Prior to that I cut grass and shoveled snow and carried groceries for little old ladies and shined shoes in the bars in Hamtramck, whatever I could do to hustle a buck. With six kids in the family it was tough. But I saw all these shops with scrap lying out back, and I started asking people if I could pick up their scrap in a little wagon. There were days I made more than my dad. That always stuck with me as I got older."

After a brief flirtation with the home modernization business -- roofing, gutters, porches, trim -- Wierszewski got back into the metals business at age 26, "and I have not turned back since."

ReNu will take any kind of metal -- copper, brass, aluminum, stainless steel, iron -- along with odds and ends like car batteries, computer scrap, X-ray film and large quantities of pre-sorted plastics. "Because all that can be recycled," Wierszewski said. "It's amazing if you clean out your garage, how much of that stuff has value. A lot of people just throw it away."

And that leads to small, independent scrap dealers who cruise neighborhoods in trucks, looking for metals.

"A lot of people feed their families, put clothes on their kids' backs, by picking up that scrap and recycling it," Wierszewski said. "I started in a truck picking up scrap."

Wierszewski bristles at the efforts of some Michigan lawmakers to outlaw small scrap dealers who pick up the night before trash day, because some of them traffic in stolen goods. And he bristles at law enforcement and the courts, who he says don't sufficiently punish those who steal scrap metal -- and who won't create a database of convicted traffickers in stolen scrap, so he can stop them at the door of his shop.

ReNu Recycling video records all entering and exiting vehicles. "From the moment you come in here you're on Candid Camera," Wierszewski said.  And before you get paid for your scrap, you leave a little memento -- your thumbprint.

"I'd like to see bigger penalties for scrap thieves, including a public registry for scrap dealers so we know who not to accept scrap from," he said.

Today's ReNu Recycling has about 70 employees and 25,000 square feet of buildings in Redford Township and another 4,000 square feet of space in Wayne.

And it's looking to grow with a new division, Renu Demolition, a demolition company he figures could get a lot of business fairly soon, as the city of Detroit gets more serious about tearing down vacant houses.

"I feel this is a very vibrant business," Wierszewski said. "People are recycling. It's a part of people's everyday life now. Every car is designed now to be recycled. Everything is designed to be recycled."

Today, he said he sends about 10 percent of his scrap overseas, down from 40 percent a few years ago. He says that's mostly due to a stronger dollar making American scrap more expensive overseas.

Nevertheless, Wierszewski said he's planning to participate on a state trade mission to China in September in an effort to develop new customers for his company's scrap.

More at www.renurecycling.com or www.renudemolition.com.