The Yard Teaches You Things No MBA Will

By Siam Sukkhee Trading Co., Ltd — 2026-09-27 — ISRI (Institute of Scrap)

Thomas Bennett was supposed to start in a scrap yard right after college. He chickened out. Drove up to the gate, looked at the place, and turned around.

Real estate seemed safer.

Then his broker switched firms and a non-compete clause locked him out of following. That bitter small-town friction—the kind that feels permanent at the time—pushed him toward an interview at Handsome Properties. The woman there, Debbie Fisher, thought he'd be a better fit somewhere else entirely. High Tide Metals. Her husband Neil ran it. One interview became a warehouse job, and fifteen years later Bennett is VP of Sales and Marketing for the same company, sitting on the board of ReMA's Southeast Region.

He still remembers what stuck with him on that warehouse floor. The small things. Not the big strategy or the commodity prices or the quarterly targets. The little details that nobody mentions in business school because business school doesn't teach you to work.

Asking questions. Paying attention. Watching how people actually move materials, negotiate, solve the problem in front of them rather than the one in the textbook.

It sounds simple because it is simple. It's also why most people miss it.

What Bennett has watched unfold over the past decade worries him more than he lets on. The scrap industry—metals, plastics, paper, all of it—has undergone a consolidation nobody in the yards talks about openly. The friends he worked alongside have sold out or folded. The independent operators are fewer. Someone corporate is always on the other end of the phone now. Technology integration and acquisition strategies are chasing inorganic growth across the sector, swallowing up the regional players who used to be names you'd see at trade shows.

Actually, that's not quite right. They're still there. The shows haven't changed. But the yards behind them have.

What keeps Bennett awake is not the consolidation itself. It's what's arriving to replace the people it displaces. Artificial intelligence. Deep learning. Sensor-based sorting systems that don't need a human eye to separate copper from brass, or to catch the material another operator would have passed on. The technology is coming at an exponential pace. In the next decade, he says, recyclers will be handling materials we haven't even thought to separate yet. And the tools to do it—the machines, the processes—will be as different from today's yards as today's yards are from manual sorting on a conveyor belt.

He's excited about it. Genuinely. He wants to bring AI sorting into High Tide and stay ahead of the curve. But excitement and concern aren't opposites in this industry anymore. They're the same feeling.

The bigger problem, as Bennett sees it, is structural. Producers don't design for end-of-life. Governments keep moving the goalposts on tariffs and trade. And the recycling association—which used to be ISRI, now ReMA—keeps fragmenting itself along commodity lines when it should be doing the opposite.

Plastics recyclers know something that metal recyclers don't. Copper yards see issues the paper side misses. For years, the Southeast Region of ReMA added nonvoting board seats for nonmetal groups, a compromise that felt like progress at the time. But Bennett thinks they stopped too early. He wants to see the whole thing integrated properly, one voice speaking for everyone recycling anything. Stronger together. More equitable. Less us-versus-them over jurisdiction.

He doesn't think ReMA has figured out how to do that yet, and it bothers him. A trade association that truly serves its members—not just throwing bigger events or fancier conferences—would answer a simple question: how do we represent everyone at the table without watering down what any single group needs?

The answer probably matters more now than it ever has, while the industry is consolidating and technology is moving this fast. When there's less of you left, you need to speak louder. And you can't do that in splinter groups.

His advice to younger people coming into the business is the same thing the warehouse taught him. Ask questions. Go on the mill tours. Don't be shy about stepping up. But respect people while you do it. The industry remembers who you are.

Bennett does everything for his family, he says, but the thing that keeps him grounded is simpler. Good coworkers and mentors who actually know the work. Not the PowerPoint. The work itself.

Source: "Technology integration and route expansion sustained buyer interest as strategics targeted inorganic growth to expand clientele while pursuing innovative, easily deployable technology solutions." — Capstone Partners

Tags: copper cathode trading Asia