Workers at Manitoba Corp. are busy filling cotton bags with copper chops, which were processed there. A huge bin of the stuff is parked behind them, and the handle of a giant metal scoop sticks out of it. The crew fits cotton bags around a spout. Ten pounds of copper falls into it.
It looks like they’re bagging coffee. But the aroma about the place isn’t java at all. It’s propane, from a fleet of busy forklifts.
Manitoba Corp. takes unprocessed scrap metal and removes contaminants such as tar-based insulation to be recycled. The company also reduces the size of items to make them suitable for re-melting or dissolving.
The coffee bags are sent to a customer who drops them into a unit to melt the copper inside. The cotton burns away nice and clean.
The plant is full of pallets with three-foot square copper sheets, each weighing around 300 pounds. Sometimes, these are cut to size for customers to feed into machines to melt copper.
Other times entire pallets, weighing around 7,000 pounds, are sent to customers capable of melting an entire sheet or bundle.
In another area, shaped like hay bales, are bundles of uncleaned copper wire, waiting to be cleaned and made into smaller, shoebox-sized bricks for customers.
These briquettes gleam as if the shiniest pennies were unwound and woven from their threads. Contrasting this are pockets of black empty space creating a roller coaster of interlacing, twisting, looping wires.
At a glance the briquettes appear lightweight, as if one could be picked up with one hand. But each weighs about 50 pounds.
History: Solomon Shine founded S. Shine and Sons in 1916. He began earning a living picking up rags, waste paper and metals from people’s homes. He’d sort and sell it.
He earned enough to buy a horse and buggy, then eventually a fleet of horses and buggies. His son Nathan earned a law degree from the University at Buffalo in 1932, practiced law, then joined the company in 1939. He turned his focus on non-ferrous metals after WWII, when synthetic fabrics like nylon, dacron and rayon made rag recycling less necessary.
Nathan’s son Richard, who today is CEO, began working there in 1970.
The name was changed to Manitoba Corp. when headquartered on Manitoba Street in Buffalo and re-launched as a metals company. The company moved to Lancaster in 1991.
It also has a smaller facility in St. Louis, Mo., operates a few joint ventures, and has a contract with a company to disassemble photocopiers in California. For retail scrap trade, it runs Lancaster Recycling & Sales Co.
Principals: Richard Shine is CEO. His son, Brian, is president.
No. of employees: Sixty. In addition to the 50 in Lancaster, 10 work in St. Louis.
Revenues: $65 million in 2008. From a volume of materials handled perspective, Brian Shine anticipates revenues to be down in 2009.
“Due to a reduction in commodity values, we’re optimistic volumes in 2009 will be the same or increased from 2008,” Brian Shine said. “The reason I’m so optimistic moving forward is the experience of my father and the enthusiasm of my brother Adam, who joined the company in March as sales manager.”
Biggest Expenditure: In 2006, the company purchased a $400,000 high-speed shredder, and a $100,000 crane to pick up copper pieces and chop them. They are adjacent to each other in the Lancaster plant.
It prepares materials for the chopping line by loading wires or other raw materials into the shredder to reduce size.
From there it goes to other places in the plant.
“It makes our process more efficient,” Brian Shine said. “Rather than feeding long pieces of wire into the chopping machines, it makes the shape of pieces more uniform.”
Customers: Typically, customers in steel, aluminum, copper, brass and nickel industries have Manitoba Corp. cut copper sheets to size or ground into smaller pieces. They’ll use these to make a copper-based alloy or to use copper as an addition to something else they’re manufacturing.
