Lexington, KY - Each year, nearly 180,000 tons of steel and more than 10,000 tons of other metals get diverted from landfill and waste heaps in the Bluegrass by Baker Iron and Metal Company.
"On the steel side, we process around 13,000 to 15,000 tons a month," said Gregory Dixon, manager of the Lexington-based company. "On the nonferrous side, it's somewhere around a million and a half to two million pounds a month." That includes aluminum, copper and brass. The recycling brings a tremendous savings in cost and energy when compared with metal production with virgin ores.
This summer, the company expanded with the acquisition of 20 acres along Old Frankfort Pike. At a July grand opening for the expansion, Congressman Ben Chandler, Mayor Jim Newberry and Ken Robinson of the Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development joined business leaders to take note of the growing company.
"Baker was a green company before anyone knew what a green company was," remarked Newberry.
In 1921, Morris Baker and Morris Wides, immigrants who had made Lexington home, opened the company on the corner of Limestone and Seventh Street in an old hemp factory building.
"Originally, most of the scrap came from the farmers and the distilleries," said Harold Baker, who led the family company after he returned from Army service during World War II. He recalled that the volume of scrap metal was much less in the company's early days. Back then, the company also cleaned and sold used rags and dealt in cowhide and furs.
"As the automobile business became more and more important, more scrap started to come from the automobile," Baker said. He saw the arrival of IBM in the '50s and the coming of more industry to the region. "Whenever you had a new plant that produced a metal product, there's scrap," he said.
Greg Dixon recalled the Lexington of his youth. "When you went from one side of town to the other, most of the time you just went through town," he said. "To go south to north, you went down Limestone, and you went past Baker Iron and Metal. I remember seeing it when I was a kid." He worked for Baker Iron and Metal starting in 1984 for 16 years before moving on to work with another recycling company. He was invited back to manage the company in 2004 when Cohen Brothers, Inc. of Middleton, Ohio, bought it. Offices and operations were moved to Seventh Street near Winchester Road. Under its new ownership, the company right off bought its main competitor in the region, Frankfort Scrap Metal, and expanded its operations with workers and equipment from Frankfort.
"We doubled our business in the first six months," said Dixon. Baker now also has branch operations in Morehead and Southern Indiana. Baker has about 70 employees, with 55 of them in Lexington - a mix of management, maintenance, machine operators and truck drivers.
On a drive around the grounds of the company's Seventh Street location, Joe Anderson, manager of nonferrous metals operations, pointed out numerous stacked bails of salvaged metal - bails of hundreds of automobile radiators stacked high and in more piles of bails, some of aluminum siding, copper piping, guttering, air conditioner coils and insulated power lines. The steel works yard has hills of crushed cars, washing machines, dryers, refrigerators, pipes, bicycle frames and all manner of discarded appliances and pieces of steel that rise up to two stories high. Overhead hydraulic cranes with big metal claws called grapples or with five-foot-wide electro-magnets lift and move metal objects for processing. A huge pair of metal shears attached to the crane cuts metal into pieces. Mixed in with all this are occasional pieces that are of uncertain origin. Anderson said he's one of two people authorized to use their Spectrometer gun, which when pressed and triggered against metal will analyze its chemical composition, identifying the alloy and informing them as to which recycling stream it belongs.
The Seventh Street yard is where the Baker offices are located. It's also where "peddlers" come to sell junked metal products. A line of pick up trucks waited at the entranceway to the yard, their back ends loaded with metal stuff to sell to Baker. The trucks drive up on scales that weigh their load. Sensors check for radioactivity. Automatic cameras document the loads. The peddlers present their IDs.
In the summer of 2007, about 10 high school students in Clark County, all members of the Future Farmers of America, decided to see who could raise more money through a metal recycling competition. Donald Laskey and William Rogers of Winchester, both 17 at the time, partnered for the task. "Over a year and a half," said Laskey, "we took in 25 tons of steel, 12 junked cars and over 1,800 pounds of aluminum." They won the informal contest, making, Laskey said, close to $10,000 for steel and about $2,500 for aluminum from the metal they delivered to Baker Iron and Metal.
"We hauled off everything we could find in the countryside," said Laskey. People on farms would point out junked cars and old machines in the overgrowth. "We got a lot of engines, a lot of fencing, tin roofing, lawn mowers, swing sets, washers and dryers, concrete mixers, old junk aluminum boats, a lot of old pipe, axles, car engines, and most of it out in fields." They worked at it until they could hardly find anything left in the county to haul off. Clark County got a cleaning, the Laskey and Rogers families could purchase some new farm equipment, and Baker put metal back into the marketplace.
The new Baker site on Old Frankfort Pike is the destination for industrial waste. One company Baker does business with is B&H Tool Works in Richmond, which does metal stamping and tooling fabrication. Baker provides containers for scrap metal, which they haul back to Lexington for processing.
The Frankfort site has dual railroad tracks and the company has a locomotive, so train cars can be moved around, loaded and positioned for the RJ Corman line to deliver to Baker's customers: steel mills, aluminum companies, copper manufacturers and so on.
"Recycling one ton of steel conserves 2,500 pounds of iron ore, 1,400 pounds of coal, and 120 pounds of limestone," said Dixon. He mentioned that the recycling of one automobile saves the energy of approximately 502 gallons of gasoline and reduces greenhouse emissions by 8,811 pounds. "Our national association, the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industry (ISRI), is extremely involved in design recycling," said Dixon, who is on the ISRI board. "We approach manufacturers all the time about working with them hand in hand, trying to get them to use materials in their products that can be recycled."
While Dixon appreciates that Baker Iron and Metal benefits the environment, he also has the marketplace to consider. Recycled metal is big business. According to ISRI, in 2007 the U.S. scrap industry in ferrous metal (magnetic) was valued at $21.6 billion, and the nonferrous scrap industry at $38 billion. Dixon is a commodities trader. Gesturing across his desk at his computer screen illuminated with a listing of commodities and their rates, he said, "This is the LME, the London Metal Exchange. These numbers represent what's going on throughout the world today on those exchanges. On the LME, you have different commodities. These are all being traded. They'll be listed on Wall Street." He may pick up the phone and call his broker to sell material the same day it arrives. Sometimes he'll wait, anticipating more favorable conditions to sell.
"You've got to be conscientious about what's going on in the marketplace," he said.