Editor's Letter - Scrap Theft Hits Home

As a writer for a recycling industry trade magazine, I always assumed that the closest I would come to materials theft would be through others, strictly as an observer relating the first-hand stories of stripped-out copper piping and missing scrap piles from the sources and readers I talk to in the pages of Recycling Today. Sure, I write and read about issues like metals theft on a daily basis, but since I’m not actually "on the ground," as the saying goes, I never really expected to have any of my own materials theft stories to share.

However, a couple weeks back, I went to help do some work on a house renovation for my family. We arrived to start the first day of our own version of the Discovery Channel’s "Flip That House," only to discover that the house had no heat—because someone had dug up and stolen the gas meter. The nice, though somewhat exasperated, man from the gas company told us it’s not uncommon. Unoccupied former rental units—like my family’s latest project—are targeted by thieves, he told us, because once vacated, the gas company typically turns off service. He said meters are then stolen for scrap.

We were shocked, not to mention cold, but materials theft comes as no surprise to the people who reckon with it on a daily basis. Skyrocketing scrap metal prices have recyclers, law enforcement agencies and local governments scrambling to figure out how to best combat such a rapidly growing problem with no easy solutions.

Scrap recyclers aren’t the only ones grappling with metals theft. As my family found out, regular homeowners aren’t immune, and neither is anyone whose work involves the use of metals that attract such a high price and the attention of potential thieves. In the next issue of Recycling Today, we take a look at exactly how metals theft is moving through different industries by talking to demolition contractors. As metals prices have gone up, so have incidents of theft from demolition sites across the country, sources say. Several contractors were willing to share their most recent scrap theft stories, and while they involve different jobs in different locations, a common thread has been increasingly brazen thieves going to sometimes absurd lengths to get material. Compounding the problem is a lack of cost-efficient ways to secure temporary work sites.

Metals theft left my family out in the cold in a single, albeit frustrating, incident. Thieves may assume that the material at demolition sites is bound for a landfill and that taking it for their own profit is a supposed "victimless" crime. However, metals theft chips away at contractors’ bottom lines every day. In many cases, contractors have already figured in money from salvaged materials as part of their bids, so any losses from the theft of material they were counting on are most certainly felt, making the crime far from "victimless."

March 2008
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