Purpose driven

Over the last decade, Shapiro has been focused on developing its company culture and digging into its purpose of bettering the planet alongside employees and manufacturing partners.

The St. Louis-based company serves manufacturers across a broad range of industries, including aerospace, automotive, semiconductor, foundry and die casting and transportation, by managing their scrap streams and designing programs that offer sustainable and circular outcomes.

By focusing on transparency, sustainability and service, Shapiro says it is helping U.S. manufacturers increase their revenues and decrease their environmental footprint.

The company has come to this point in its 120-year history in part by creating a culture where its employees have a voice, enabling new ideas and innovation to thrive.

CEO Bruce Shapiro, the third generation of the Shapiro family to own and operate the business, says more than a decade ago, he would have dismissed this purpose of making the planet better together as “just a bunch of bullshit,” but his thinking has evolved since then.

“I don’t believe that anymore,” he says. “I believe that we can make the planet better, and we are making a difference by focusing on sustainability. The things that we’re doing are very important for the future of the planet and everybody.”

While Bruce Shapiro tries to keep an open mind, he says, “The older you get, you’ve got to work harder on that.”

But when an employee approached him about looking more broadly at waste streams of the company’s manufacturing customers to find alternatives to disposal, he allowed him to explore the opportunity even though it didn’t make sense to him at the time.

“We substantially reduced their CO2,” he says of Shapiro’s results for that first customer in the HVAC sector. “We reduced their trash pickups by 80 percent. We tried to get them to zero landfill, and I think we might have even done that.

“It’s those kinds of things that we’re doing right now. And that makes me proud of what we’re doing, and I see this kind of opportunity in a different way than I saw it before. It’s quite exciting to see those things happen and the fact that we can impact the climate and hopefully make things better.”

Along with the positive climate impacts, Shapiro was able to save that customer more than $150,000.

Embracing sustainability services and providing data customers need to address sustainability challenges and goals have been two outcomes of Shapiro’s efforts to build an empowered and engaged company culture.

Engaged employees

With the addition of Bob Alvarez in 2015 as vice president of operations, Shapiro began to reexamine its company culture.

Alvarez, whose professional background includes management roles in operations and human resources as well as strategic and organizational leadership outside the recycling industry, was named president and chief operating officer in 2020.

Since joining the company, he has worked with the other Shapiro Metals leaders to build a culture of transparency, integrity and partnership that regards the company’s personnel as its most important asset.

Bruce Shapiro says the company’s culture is guided by a number of principles that include treating people the way you want to be treated, challenging everything and giving everyone an opportunity regardless of their role, collaborating, taking risks, continually learning and acknowledging the importance of passionate persistence.

“To attract good people, you have to have good culture,” says Rick Dobkin, chief commercial officer and head of Shapiro’s Master Alloys division.

A 30-year company veteran whose father, Stan Dobkin, led the business with Bruce Shapiro in the 1970s, he says company leadership has worked over the last decade to make Shapiro a place where people want to work and are engaged. The company aims to hire employees who will have an impact on the business and challenge the status quo, he adds, enabling further growth.

Ensuring Shapiro brings onboard people who fit its culture involves a multistep interview process with six to eight people led by Chief of Staff Emily Patterson. Candidates also take various tests, including a personality test.

Shapiro also looks outside the recycling industry to recruit job candidates.

“I don’t care about your background, you’re going to have the opportunity to be treated right, to be heard, to be listened to, to collaborate and to move yourself forward,” Bruce Shapiro says of new recruits. “It’s really rewarding to know that people are really doing great stuff because they want to and because they believe in it.”

Chief Marketing Officer Judy Ferraro says Shapiro and its employees are characterized by two core “obsessions” and three core behaviors. The company is obsessed with taking a data-driven approach and providing an exceptional experience for its consumers, vendors and teammates.

“Our core behaviors are to find and fix the hard stuff, which is all the sustainability [questions our customers have]; pitch in—we all pitch in and help each other—and the last one is, ‘We’re never going back,’ which she characterizes as a continuous improvement mindset,” Ferraro says.

“When you hire great people with a great attitude and you give them these opportunities, good things can happen,” Bruce Shapiro adds.

“We don’t want to continue doing things the way we have always done,” Dobkin adds. “We want to innovate.”

Ever evolving

One way Shapiro is evolving is with its embrace of sustainability services through its Circular by Shapiro division.

Circular by Shapiro is one of three recently formed divisions. The other two are its core industrial scrap management business and Master Alloys, which produces recycled aluminum sow and ingot that allows its partners to meet their recycled content and sustainability goals without relying on primary metals and maintaining proper quality and chemistry.

Circular by Shapiro helps manufacturers transition to a circular economy with service-based sustainability management solutions, including dashboards to simplify environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) reporting.

In addition to setting up sustainability programs for its clients, Circular by Shapiro’s proprietary reporting tools offer insights into their businesses and enable data-driven decision-making capabilities. These platforms enable businesses to monitor, evaluate and enhance their sustainability efforts, ensuring a more efficient and eco-conscious operational strategy, according to the company.

Aluminum makes up 75 percent to 80 percent of the nonferrous scrap metal Shapiro handles through its industrial scrap management business. While nonferrous represents the bulk of the couple hundred million pounds of metals the company processes annually, it also operates a few dedicated ferrous yards.

“All of our yards are based on industry in that area,” Bruce Shapiro says. “We’ve grown organically. We’ve never bought anybody, and so we find businesses in areas that look like they have good opportunities, and then we expand from there.”

Shapiro consumes some of the recovered aluminum it handles to make remelt secondary ingot, or RSI, for its consuming customers through its Master Alloys division, something Bruce Shapiro says has “evolved over a period of time.”

When he began working for the company in the 1970s, he says the U.S. was home to some 50 secondary smelters, which has dwindled to fewer than 10.

“We tried making some secondary aluminum alloys, and I learned over a seven-year period of time that I was a buyer of scrap in a seller’s market, a seller of ingot in a buyer’s market and I wasn’t good at manufacturing,” Bruce Shapiro says, prompting the company to abandon that effort 40 years ago in favor of partnering with those that produce alloys using its scrap, which then is marketed by Shapiro.

“We’re able to use our own scrap, buy scrap on the outside market and produce what we’re trying to produce,” he continues, referencing the one-man-horse-and-buggy operation his grandfather, Max, started when he emigrated to the U.S. in 1904. “So, that’s been a pretty big evolution from junk peddler.”

Dobkin says for as long as he’s been with Shapiro, the company has reclaimed dross and other types of scrap that are better off remelted into sow or RSI. However, five years ago, Alvarez tasked him with growing the Master Alloys business.

At the time, we were probably doing 25 million pounds a year of RSI,” Dobkin says. “We hired on some people to help me. We were doing maybe 20 percent growth a year for about three or four years.

“Then, this year, with a valiant team effort, our sales went through the roof. We’re up 60-something percent over last year, and there’s a good chance we could double the business this year. It’s really a function of us bringing on a team of experts who work well together.”

He says the Master Alloys division evolved out of Shapiro’s desire to help its manufacturing and consuming partners get away from using primary metal in favor of a more sustainable product.

“It’s a great story around that in that what we’re making is 100 percent recycled content and it’s displacing primary aluminum,” which Dobkin notes reduces CO2 emissions as well as wastewater and solid waste. “It fit really well into our purpose, which is making the plant get better together.”

The Master Alloys division also provides substitutes for primary silicon and magnesium.

Customer focused

Dobkin says the Master Alloys and Circular by Shapiro divisions evolved from Shapiro’s desire to approach its partner base differently. “Instead of approaching them with, ‘Here’s this thing that Shapiro has to offer,’ we’re really going out and asking questions of them, [like,] ‘How can we help you?’” he adds.

The company also has helped establish closed-loop recycling programs.

“We have about three or four programs set up now where our supplier brings the metal to us, we put it in a form that the mill will take it and then that it goes back to the mill,” Dobkin says. “We’ve got one supplier who’s very committed to doing that, and then we’ve got a couple others that are just starting out. There’s a lot of opportunities there to do that, and we are embracing those programs because I think it’s the wave of the future and it’s the way to go. A lot of our suppliers need to improve the amount of recycled content they use and they need to reduce their carbon impact.”

With a team of engaged problem- solvers Shapiro has built, Bruce Shapiro says, “I’m excited about this culture that’s been created and what we’re doing.

“There’s only one thing I’m sure of in this business and that is that next year at this time, we will be doing things that we didn’t dream of right now.”

The author is editorial director of Recycling Today Media Group and can be reached at dtoto@gie.net.