Chatham Nature Writing Blog: Prompt #4 Entry

A scant smell of sulfur lists into the air on a morning in March, the otherwise bright pre-cursor to spring tinged by hints of acidity. The houses on my street lie under a cloud of unseen toxins, as if the sky is coughing itself awake the way a lifelong smoker hacks and gags his way into the day. I have known of the scrap yard on the hill, it has been there for as long as this neighborhood has been my home, longer, according to the company’s website, than my house has been where it sits.

Until recently, I did not know what non-ferrous meant; truth be told I also did not know what ferrous meant either. Driving past the facility where Tube City IMS recycles steel and aluminum is a common commute to the mall and to the movie theatre. A sign advertises both a ferrous and non-ferrous plant; separate entrances are marked by corrugated signs, one for each type of metal. Only when I had aluminum to cash-out did I start to think of what goes on there and consider its place in the community.

Ferrous refers to metals that have a trace of iron in them and non-ferrous being those without iron. It seems logical, then, that ferrous metals would be magnetic. But what do I know? According to The Tenebaum Recycling group, "ferrous metals are in the form of steel and iron and commonly take on magnetic qualities" (www.trg.net). The Tube City plant hauls cars, refrigerators, and all sorts of scrap from window frames to bed frames in and out on a daily basis. Judging by the mountain of twisted rust, business is good. But at what cost?

The scrap yard is no more than a quarter-mile from my house as the crow flies, and as the air currents move and as sunshine illuminates the pile of junk. At night, the lights of the midnight shift can be seen as a twinkle, a shimmer of obfuscated stars through which a crane passes to cast a shadow, a beam interrupted.

If it were my choice I would remove the noise before the smell. The pollution index seems to be bothersome on only certain days, humid days or rainy days when atmospheric moisture holds escaping toxins down and blankets surrounding areas with the shop’s sharp and bitter odor. That rain runs off into streams and carries particles of rust, chips of decaying paint, oozes of leftover oil, and drops of undrained windshield washer fluid toward the water treatment plant. In small doses small business poisons a small amount of water. They count the toxicity in "trace" amounts of so many particles per so many millions of gallons, the assumption being that so little can do no harm. Our treatment plant dumps chemicals into the water to neutralize the iron, the niacin, the sulfates, the whatever-it-is that gets into the so-called fresh supply. As a whole, as Society, we recycle those things we desire and others which we do not.

If we were not so distracted by our work routine and our family hopes, we might add to our agenda that such a business needs to report to us, to someone, to anyone not with a vested interest, just what it is doing to preserve our community. Does it spray-wash acid battery sludge as part of the cleaning process? Do they gut the car and properly dispose of plastics and rubber, or do those things burn up in some fiery blaze that is only occasionally seen emitting from the multiple-acred plant atop the hill across the way? And does such a pyre offer up the acrid scents I catch in the morning? The smoky smell cannot just be from smashing metal in a grinder. Something else must be going on. Metals burn at extreme heat, so too do car cushions and windshield wipers. Day to day, though, it is the noise that creates calamity.

The clack-clang-crash sounds repeatedly. It isn't quite a disturbance as a persistent nuisance, something we recognize as background noise that doesn't do much to ruin our social events. A picnic might be going on in the yard when a car lets loose from the magnetic crane above a pile of mashed metal, and the crash-boom-slide-screech distracts momentarily as we look westward to make sure it is just the scrap workers at their toil and not a plane going down or a car going into a pole. We return to conversation. What were we talking about?


Works Cited

"Ferrous Metal Recycling." Tenebaum Recycling Group. http://www.trg.net/metals-recycling/ferrous-metal-recycling. (Accessed March 2, 2o12)