Scrap

With just $700 and a pickup truck, seventeen-year-old Steve Young created a multi-million dollar company in an industry that is fraught with crooks and gangsters but is also helping save the earth from environmental disaster.

Steve Young was too busy creating his multi-million dollar business, Allan Company, to spend much time thinking about his place in his or his family's history. Starting at the age of seventeen with just $700 and a pickup truck, Steve worked 14-hour days, six or seven days a week, to build his empire out of the stuff that people and industries got rid of: scrap.

Before 'recycling' became the mantra of environmentalists, scrap companies were doing just that and making money in the process, buying from companies eager to get rid of their production waste and selling to those eager to put it to use. Steve had been working in and around the industry since a kid and by the time he was a junior in high school, he was savvy enough to bet that he could create a future for himself in a crazy commodity that would always be plentiful.

But sooner or later money attracts a criminal element and that was the case in the scrap business, especially in California after 1986 when the California Beverage Container Recycling Program was passed. This program created the California Redemption Value (CRV), a program reimbursing consumers a fee paid when purchasing eligible plastic bottles and aluminum cans. Pretty quickly, mafia-style gangsters were taking over businesses and threatening law-abiding scrap dealers.

Steve Young has seen and done it all in the over 54 years since Allan Company's inception, from being one of the first West Coast scrap companies to sell to the very competitive mills in Asia to opening, buying or partnering in over 43 scrap and scrap-related businesses. He has stared down a gun-toting Russian-Chechen gangster with his own locked and loaded 9mm Glock. He is one of the most respected men in California's and the West Coast's scrap industry, has gone head-to-head with California's Environmental Protection Agency, worked on sting operations with the California Justice Department and lunched with the FBI.

And finally, at the age of 60, Steve, a long-time lover of history, decided to delve into his own family's past and weave it into his very personal story. A story that began in Scotland over 144 years ago when twenty-year-old David Herbertson Young made his way to Liverpool, England and hopped aboard a steamship bound for the United States of America to start a new life and seek his fortune.

Steve Young's story is a fascinating and timely subject sure to find a wide audience with lovers of the memoir as well as those interested in recycling, the environment and business in general. And for those seeking the formula for how to make their mark and fortune in business, this is definitely a true "rags to riches" story.

But more than a tutorial on the recycling industry or making a succe...