A Perpetual Pioneer

Even after several decades in the industry, Harry Kletter keeps searching for new recycling ideas and techniques.

Experience may be the best teacher, but Harry Kletter is not always convinced it should have the final say.

Kletter, 73, is the chief visionary officer with Industrial Services of America, Inc. (ISA), Louisville, Ky. Growing up in Detroit as part of a scrap collecting and processing family, Kletter has witnessed and operated a multitude of recycling operations and techniques in a span covering parts of nine decades. But as his title implies, by no means does he believe that the recycling idea well has run dry.

Throughout his life, Kletter has been willing to experiment, pioneer and take risks in order to grow his own business as well as advance the recycling industry overall.

A Scrapper's Son

Harry Kletter grew up at a time when the term “melting pot” was coined to describe the ethnic make-up of urban neighborhoods such as Detroit’s east side during the 1920s and ‘30s. While the term has a nostalgic Normal Rockwell feel to it for some, Kletter recalls that things were not always so idyllic.

Kletter’s immigrant parents—from Russia and Austria—were the only Jews in the immediate neighborhood, making Harry and his family not just curiosities, but also targets for the less tolerant.

In the Depression era, Harry’s father, Max, had a business cleaning up and preparing for re-sale properties that had been foreclosed upon. Much of what was cleaned out from the properties made its way to the salvage yard of Harry’s uncle and cousins, who had started a scrap business that began with a horse and cart and was nurtured into a land-owning enterprise.

By the late 1930s, with less of the foreclosure work to perform, the Kletter family started a Detroit scrap company called Illinois Waste Materials Co. Their timing proved outstanding, as World War II brought with it a revived steel industry and a patriotic fervor to collect scrap and keep the blast furnaces stoked.

In 1945, Harry was old enough to enlist in the Navy, where he saw enough of the world to realize that there would always be something new to see—and that one of his priorities in life would be to make sure he made the time to travel and see it.

Staking Out New Territory

After his stint in the Navy, Harry Kletter was full of ideas and was not always finding himself in agreement with the business decisions being made by other family members in Detroit.

Traveling to Cincinnati, Kletter worked for a short time for Abe Byers. By 1953, Tri City Scrap Baling was established, and the property on Grade Lane in Louisville [where today’s ISA is headquartered] became a scrap processing facility. In 1961 Anchorpac, a maker of stationary compactors for the waste industry, was purchased. Shortly thereafter, Tri-Pak was established to manufacture and distribute refuse handling equipment on a national and international basis. While recycling has been the unifying theme in most of Kletter’s business ventures, his trademarks have been a willingness to experiment and an urge to travel to gather ideas and information from locations across the country and around the world.

It is probably safe to say that Kletter was ahead of many others in the scrap industry in his ability to move beyond local markets, in part because he obtained a pilot’s license in the 1950s. Kletter recalls buying some scrap airplanes and engines from an airfield in the 1950s, and striking up a deal to take flying lessons as part of the sales agreement.

“If we had not flown, we would never have grown the way we did,” he says of his company. “We were everywhere so easily in the ‘50s. We were able to get to remote places and make deals for pipeline scrap and surplus,” he recalls. “We would go out on Tuesday and come back on Thursday having acquired materials. It was a great asset.”

Kletter does not go out on scrap search missions today, but he still enjoys flight and travel, and finds the passenger compartment of an airplane as good a place as any office or library to get work done and research business conditions.

When possible, Kletter travels with his wife, Bobbie, and also schedules many family reunions at distant locales where family members can meet up.

“30% to 40% of the reason we grew was flying,” asserts Kletter. “Every piece of equipment I’ve bought was from traveling and seeing it.”

His willingness to travel has allowed him to build the former Tri-City Scrap into the public company ISA is today, with operating units such as Computerized Waste Systems (CWS) that manage the solid waste and recycling needs of national clients such as Home Depot and Office Depot.

In 1967, Industrial Services of America, Inc. was formed and by 1969 it became the first public company in the waste and recycling business. ISA owned, operated, and managed recycling plants, waste hauling companies, and landfills in cities throughout the United States. “We even operated our own seminars and taught most of the heads of today’s largest waste companies,” remembers Kletter.

Beyond the tangible aspects of building a publicly-traded national company, Kletter also remarks that flying and international travel opened the doors for adventures and memories that have been part of a full life. One noteworthy example: his 1980s investment in a Philippines paper recycling operation that coincided with the downfall of the Ferdinand Marcos regime. “We were on the island of Baton and we would get stopped at one checkpoint by armed guards who backed Marcos, travel a few miles, and then get stopped at a checkpoint manned by rebels.”

Fortunately, says Kletter, he was with someone who knew how to say the right things to allow them to go unharmed through checkpoints of either faction. “I lost $200,000, but it was a lot of fun and something I’ll never forget,” he says of his Philippines venture.

Better Ways and Bigger Ideas

There is a 50-year-old photograph that Harry Kletter keeps that is labeled and dated: “First Annual Scrap Seminar, Institute of Scrap Iron & Steel, Inc., Northwestern University, Chicago, August 28-September 2, 1949.”

One of the younger faces in the group shot of some 240 people belongs to Harry Kletter. It is not surprising that Kletter, a lifelong scrap recycler, a lifelong traveler, and a person always looking for new ideas, would be among the attendees at the first ISIS (one of the predecessor organizations to ISRI) national event.

A look at Kletter’s and ISA’s history shows that he has had an ability to “think outside the box” before that particular cliché was even coined.

While never forsaking his core scrap operations, Kletter has diversified in a number of ways. Whether it was developing and manufacturing waste compactors, operating “the world’s smallest hammermill” to process light bulbs, or buying something called a computer, ISA was designed to evolve. As currently configured, ISA consists of the following operating units:

ISA Recycling, a Louisville and Seymour, Indiana scrap operation, currently engaged in a major processing project of demolition scrap generated by Ford Motor Company at a nearby plant site. “We’ll always own this, even if indirectly,” Kletter says of the scrap operations. He believes that the tangible, hands-on work with the commodities “leads us into the intangible sectors. Sometimes when we talk to investors, they don’t see how the recycling center has led us into knowledge and shows us what the commodities that we take care of look like.”