NAICS 4181Industry group · 4-digitregional market1 market record

Recyclable material merchant wholesalers

SoftwareWholesale Distribution ERP & Route Accounting 418

This industry group comprises establishments primarily engaged in wholesaling recyclable metals, paper and paperboard, and other recyclable materials. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A

Establishments · CanadaA: 1,405
Under 10 employeesA: 62%

Size and shape

How many businesses there are and how small they are. Fragmentation is the first thing an entrant — or anyone selling software into this industry — needs to know, and it is one of the few things that is actually measured.

Canadian establishments by number of employeesA

1–452437%

5–935225%

10–1926119%

20–4919314%

50–99483%

100–199222%

200–49940%

500+10%

Of 1,405 Canadian establishments with employees, 62% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.

Where they areA

Ontario49535%

Quebec26819%

British Columbia22416%

Alberta14710%

Largest four provinces by establishment count. Establishments with employees only — sole operators with no payroll are not in this table, so in trades and personal services the true number of businesses is higher.

How many new establishments are still tradingA

Wholesale Trade, US · opened 2020

82.8%

1 year

64.3%

3 years

51.2%

5 years

34.4%

10 years

opened 2015

Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.

No US figure is shown. County Business Patterns is coded to the 2017 US edition of NAICS; this code either does not exist there, names a different industry, or is outside the programme's coverage (most of agriculture, rail, postal and public administration are). A figure is attached only where both the code and the title agree.

How businesses here compete

The structural profile of subsector 418, which every industry beneath it inherits. This is analyst judgment from how the subsector is organised — not research into this industry, and not a measurement.

regional competitionmedium capitalUNVERIFIEDinherited from 418 Miscellaneous merchant wholesalers

A residual. Scrap and recycling yards are the distinctive business here: permitted sites buying at the scale and selling into a global commodity.

Who sets the price: Varies — recyclables follow commodity prices; supplies follow contract bids.
The software it runs on: Distribution ERP; scale and yard systems for scrap.

Market screens and studies

Market-entry records filed along this branch of the hierarchy. A record at or beneath this code is about this industry; one above it is about something wider that contains it.

Operating businessScreened

Scrap & Recyclable Material YardsOne thing must be true

binding constraint: growth quality

A scrap yard buys at a price set by global commodity markets and sells into the same, holding inventory through the swing — a leveraged commodity position wearing a waste-management costume. Environmental permitting of the site is the real barrier and the real asset. What this screen adds is the arithmetic of the one North American processor that had to publish it. Radius Recycling — 54 metal recycling facilities across 25 US states, Puerto Rico and Western Canada — earned US$168.8M of net income in fiscal 2022, then lost US$25.8M and US$266.4M in the two years that followed, on revenue that fell only 5%, from US$2,882M to US$2,739M [A]. Revenue barely moved and the result swung by US$435M, because the margin is the gap between two prices the yard does not set, and the metal on the ground is long that spread whether the owner wants to be or not. Toyota Tsusho then took the company private at US$30.00 a share in cash [A] — a strategic buying tonnage for its own supply chain rather than an investor buying earnings, because there were none to buy. A Canadian entrant would be holding the same position with a fraction of that balance sheet and no mill behind it. Volumes are structurally exposed on top of that to whether export markets stay open to mixed material, which no operator controls. What the independents have instead is local feedstock and a permit: 876 of the 1,405 Canadian yards have fewer than ten employees, and they survive on the scrap that physically comes to them.

NAICS 41815 vendors named9 sourced figuresOpen →

Software serving this industry

The vertical software markets filed along the same branch — who sells to these businesses and who they would have to displace — and then the generic categories every business buys whatever it does.

Sold across the wider branch

Vertical softwareScreenedfiled at 418 Miscellaneous merchant wholesalers

Wholesale Distribution ERP & Route AccountingStructure decides

binding constraint: entry cost

Incumbent Epicor (Prophet 21, Eclipse) and Infor Distribution

Replacing a distributor's ERP means migrating pricing matrices, contract terms and years of inventory history in a business that ships the next morning — a two-year implementation nobody buys from a new vendor. The generic ERP record at 541514 covers the horizontal alternative; this vertical exists precisely because that alternative does not handle rebates and route settlement. Nothing is disclosed here. Every vendor named on this record is private, or sits inside a parent that does not break the line out, so no revenue floor can be built and the market size is genuinely unknown rather than estimated.

NAICS 4183 vendors namedOpen →

And what every business buys · 25 generic categories

Sold to every industry rather than this one, so they are filed against the software industry's own code. The same few vendors recur across most of them.

Companies in this industry · 6

Every company this research names that is filed here or beneath — the operators, and the vendors that sell to them — largest disclosed revenue first. The rank is within the company’s own six-digit industry.

Company	Filed under	Revenue	Rank
Radius RecyclingPrivate	Recyclable material merchant wholesalers4181	$2.7B	1/6
American Iron & MetalPrivate	Recyclable material merchant wholesalers4181	—	2/6
Commercial MetalsNYSE:CMC	Recyclable material merchant wholesalers4181	—	3/6
NucorPrivate	Recyclable material merchant wholesalers4181	—	4/6
Sims GroupASX:SGM	Recyclable material merchant wholesalers4181	—	5/6
Triple M MetalPrivate	Recyclable material merchant wholesalers4181	—	6/6

Who works here

The occupations employed in Wholesale trade, most concentrated in it first. The share is measured against the whole sector, not this industry — the published cross-tabulation stops there.

Concentrated in this sectorA

Retail and wholesale trade managers One industry 16.6%

Retail salespersons and non-technical wholesale trade sales and account representatives Mostly one sector 9.2%

Labourers in processing, manufacturing and utilities Mostly one sector 8.7%

Managers in transportation and postal and courier services Mostly one sector 8.5%

Crane operators and water well drillers Mostly one sector 7.3%

Taxi, personal service and delivery service drivers Mostly one sector 6.8%

Supervisors, processing and manufacturing occupations Mostly one sector 6.1%

Machine operators and related workers in mineral and metal products processing and manufacturing One industry 5.8%

Machine operators and related workers in textile, fabric, fur and leather products processing and manufacturing One industry 5.5%

Machine operators and related workers in food, beverage and associated products processing One industry 5.3%

These jobs are mostly done here. An operator in this industry is competing for them against others in the same industry, not against the whole economy.

And the jobs every business has

Administrative and financial supervisors Across the economy 10.9%

Technical occupations in electronics and electrical engineering Across the economy 7.9%

Financial, insurance and related administrative support workers Across the economy 6.7%

Legislative and senior managers Across the economy 6.2%

Customer and information services representatives Across the economy 6%

Administrative services managers Across the economy 5.1%

Technical occupations in computer and information systems Across the economy 4%

Survey, statistical and data entry occupations Across the economy 3.3%

Administrative, property and payroll officers Across the economy 2.8%

Shoe repairers, shoemakers and upholsterers Across the economy 2.5%

Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. In a small establishment several of these are usually one person, or an outside provider.

All 162 occupations →

Inside this industry

3 rows sit directly beneath 4181, and 6 in all once every level is counted. Each has a base report of its own.

Code	Industry	Establishments · CA	What is known
41811	Recyclable metal merchant wholesalers	851	screened at 4181
41812	Recyclable paper and paperboard merchant wholesalers	77	screened at 4181
41819	Other recyclable material merchant wholesalers	477	screened at 4181

Alongside it, under 418 Miscellaneous merchant wholesalers

Code	Industry	Establishments · CA	What is known
4182	Paper, paper product and disposable plastic product merchant wholesalers	918	Packaging & Janitorial Supply Distributor
4183	Agricultural supplies merchant wholesalers	1,361	Independent Crop Input Retailer
4184	Chemical (except agricultural) and allied product merchant wholesalers	1,290	Chemical Distribution Branch
4185	Mineral, ore and precious metal merchant wholesalers	85	Precious Metals Trading Desk
4186	Log, wood chips, and other wood products merchant wholesalers	82	Log & Wood Fibre Brokerage
4189	Other miscellaneous merchant wholesalers	1,419	Second-Hand Goods Wholesaler