377 words.

The reverse supply chain is like a bizarro mirror version. The raw materials at the start of this backward chain are finished products: hot water heaters, car bodies, coffee makers, computers. That’s why metal recycling is sometimes called “urban mining.” Like ore, those products contain valuable metals that are mixed with, bonded to, or dissolved into unwanted junk material. Just as you need to separate out rare earths from bastnaesite ore, you need to separate out the copper embedded in a lawnmower from all the non-copper parts. To do that, you need to disassemble the lawnmower into its components, then break those components down to separate out discrete materials. Then, those materials need to be melted down, purified, and reconstituted as fresh metal, finally ready to be recycled into a whole new product. But first, you need to get your hands on those old, worn-out products, the raw materials of recycling. 

In many ways, Steve is a unique character. But the key challenge he has to deal with is the same one faced by all actors at the beginning of the reverse supply chain: how to efficiently gather enough scrap to make the effort financially worthwhile. 

That’s difficult, because the final link in the regular supply chain isn’t a link at all. It’s a point of dispersal, like the end of a rope fraying into a thousand strands. Products arrive at stores or delivery warehouses in concentrated, orderly truckloads. But they leave as hundreds or thousands of individual products, each scattering out to a different office or home, spreading randomly across the land like dandelion fluff. To get them all back into the reverse supply chain, somehow all those atomized products have to be gathered back up again. 

Big scrap dealers buy most of their feedstock in bulk—leftovers from construction sites and industrial facilities, for instance, or junk from demolitions. But that leaves out the countless tons of miscellaneous scrap scattered throughout millions of offices, small businesses, and homes. The first obstacle to collecting this metal is right outside your house—or rather, it isn’t outside your house: There’s no bin to put scrap metal in the way there is for paper and glass. Metal recyclers don’t come to you. You have to go to them.

Excerpted from Chp 8 of Power Metal: The Race for the Resources that will shape the future by Vince Beiser.