Recycling copper, no questions asked?

Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2009 | 2 a.m.

I used to have streetlights in my neighborhood in Mountain’s Edge, but “recyclers” have stolen the electrical wire out of them and for the past eight months I come home to my house in the dark. No one seems to want to replace cable that will most likely get ripped out again. Why do metal recycling firms seem to have no problem taking truckloads of copper over and over from the same guys, in the same trucks, and resell it as scrap without question? Is there no accountability?

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Metro Police began noticing the disappearance of recyclable metal from the valley’s infrastructure, and its appearance at local recycling yards, in 2006.

Since then, said Robert Duvall, lieutenant in charge of the auto/construction theft section at Metro, police have figured out how to fight the problem.

Officers are in recycling centers just about every day, checking logs, he said.

“If we see their log and there’s a bunch of generic names and no ID, we’ve got a problem. That person could very well be cited,” he said. “That’s the first step. Then we’ll sit outside and stop the trucks of wire coming in to make sure it’s from a legitimate source.”

In August, police carried out a high-profile raid of ABC Recycling, which was accused of accepting boosted scrap metal and metal from stolen vehicles. (Police have proposed changes to the law they say would make it easier to identify bad operators.)

Since that raid, copper thefts have declined sharply, Duvall said.

A corresponding decline in the price of recycled metals is certainly a factor. But police believe their tactics are working.

“Sure it still happens,” Duvall said. “Does it happen without accountability? Absolutely not. Copper theft isn’t a sexy problem until it affects somebody. That’s not a slight, that’s just how it is. But a lot of people don’t know what we’ve been doing.”

Questions for Mr. Sun should be sent to [email protected].