The Metal Rush - "We collect iron!"

"Ooooooold iron! We buy oooooooold iron!"

That's the song of the early entrepreneurs that were prospecting the old-iron-rich lands of the villages and slums of the cities in the '90s. Just listen to the song below.

^{Days are long but in a metal collector's office. But they are easy...}

"They struck that iron-rich vein of the old, oil extraction tools factory in the East of the city!"
One of the tales that early 2000's came with. People were getting rich only by dismantling old factories colossus. People involved in totally different activities 'till then, quickly registered one or more Limited Companies and started producing that fast, fat cash.

The iron was abundant. It was already extracted and just waiting to be taken from the former glories of the industry, now mere ghosts. In places where others were seeing steady jobs, 10-15 years before, now the "cardboard" millionaires saw only free iron to be taken; democracy turned out to be a complete bitch and was coming back for payback time.

The cast iron factory close to my office was bought by an Italian millionaire back in 2000. When the Government sold it, the contract had clauses that were binding the new owner to do tens of millions of USD investments in the next 10 years. There was so much refined iron in the factory that everybody was looking at it as to some pile of horseshit that they didn't even know what to do with it. Even the pavements throughout the factory were cast in iron. In less than 2 years, the factory was stripped down of every ounce of iron, workers unemployed and the millionaire took the money and left for some tropical and fiscal paradise. The idiots who sold it took back what was left of it. Some deserted and destroyed buildings and the land. The irony is that now, on it's grounds, there's the activity of one of the main iron recyclers in Romania.

^{Nothing is left unused. Even the scrap dust and whatever filling remains is loaded up and "choo choo" is taken to China}

Like mushrooms after a summer rain, small collecting yards started to appear in order to quench the selling thirst of the prospectors. Little by little communities gathered around this new profession, and "the scavenging" process became more and more mainstream. There is a constant flow of material now between the collectors, the centralising private units made in the backyard of grandma, the big recyclers that compact everything and ship it usually to the Black Sea port. More than 80% goes abroad, usually China, where containers come back filled with processed iron.

At the bottom of the chain, life is like you would imagine it when collecting iron from wherever you can find it: dirty, cheap and barely legal. That includes, but is not limited to:

• scavaging in the garbage dump
• burning car tires in order to take out the wire in it
• breaking concrete until you can take out the iron structure in it
• accidental discoveries in places nobody bothered to look before

Sometimes, small yards where metal is collected can be a good source for the finest of the scavengers: those who look for metal antiques or still useful items that the superficial eye of the gipsies who dig it up from the dirt, overlook. If these places would not be run by thick-necked brutes, usually in conflict with the law, they would make good places to go inside and photograph abstractly but not only. Unfortunately, you are not advised to go looming around there with your camera in the hand. They would either think you are sent by the authorities or worse, by some competition.

^{Like a cardinal point sign, the offers of the metal yard collectors are self explanatory}

^{"We collect iron" - Repurposing the back of traffic signs is an effective and cheap way to advertise}

^{Not only iron is on the rush. Copper is very sought after; I know better as somebody broke into my shop just to cut the power chords of my tools, rip the cables in the walls and break the welding machines for the copper coils}

Sometimes I wonder how much scrap metal can there be in Romania. The people that have developed a way of life and of living, have been massively collecting for more than 20 years. Still, heaps and heaps of iron are being collected, aluminium cans are still largely recovered by these people from the garbage dump and glass + plastic is a new trend also.
Carts, both animal and human powered, are coming by the hundreds in a pretty small city like mine. Of course... a city like this still keeps a lot of its industrial corpses around and many are still free to roam...steal.

Whatever our society couldn't handle in recycling on the level of educated procedures, is being substituted by the low class citizens who see in each gram of iron a gram of bread and/or meat.