Scrap & Recyclable Material Yards
The industry — Recyclable material merchant wholesalers
Base industry report for 4181 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 1,405
- Under 10 employeesA
- 62%
Of 1,405 Canadian establishments with employees, 62% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
One thing must be trueEntry turns on a single condition that can be named and tested before much is spent. Clear it and this becomes an execution question; fail it and no amount of operating skill helps.
Take share rather than ride the market. Demand is flat, seasonal or policy-driven, so growth has to come out of a competitor. That is possible and it is slower, and it rewards an operator who can wait.
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.
This is not a probability of success, and it is not a verdict on you. No survival probability is published per market, and inventing one would be worse than saying so. What the bar reads is how much of the outcome sits inside an operator's control: green means the hurdles are ones a better operator clears, red means the binding constraint is capital, an asset or a permission rather than execution. Someone arriving with an advantage this screen did not assume can win a market shown in red.
Companies named in this market · 6
The 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.
Material is hauled in from a radius that freight economics define, while the price is global. Sized by tonnage through one permitted site.
Who you would be competing with
The operators already at scale here, and whoever is buying these businesses. In most of these industries the competition an entrant meets is local, so this is who sets the terms rather than a list of everyone in the trade.
Financials & market size — sourced
Figures that came from a filing, a results release or reputable reporting, each carrying its evidence tier.
Market size, derived
Built from the competitor set upward rather than quoted from a forecast. Published TAMs in these categories are frequently reverse-engineered from each other, so any published figure is checked against the vendor arithmetic rather than trusted on its own.
Disclosed revenue from 1 of 5 named vendors. The market is at least this large.
No vendor has both a disclosed revenue and a published share.
Only a revenue floor is known — the true market is larger by whatever the undisclosed vendors earn.
Competitor set · 5 named · 1 disclose revenue
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Radius RecyclingA | $2.7B | — | FY2024 revenue to 31 August 2024, US$ — Formerly Schnitzer Steel and NASDAQ-listed; wholly owned by Toyota Tsusho since 10 July 2025. Lost US$266.4M in its last reported year |
| Sims LimitedASX: SGMC | not disclosed | — | Global metal recycler with North American operations; its own results were not opened for this record |
| Commercial Metals / Nucor (David J. Joseph)C | not disclosed | — | Mill-owned scrap processing — the competitor that can pay above the market because it is buying its own raw material |
| American Iron & Metal / Triple M MetalC | not disclosed | — | The large Canadian private groups, Montreal and Ontario; neither publishes revenue |
| The independent yardsA | not disclosed | — | 1,405 Canadian establishments with employees, 876 of them under ten people; Ontario 495, Quebec 268, British Columbia 224 (Statistics Canada, December 2023) |
Evidence
Evidence. Radius Recycling's revenue and net income for fiscal 2022–2024 were read from the annual 10-K values in its own SEC XBRL company facts, and the US$30.00 per share merger consideration from Section 3.01(a) of the Agreement and Plan of Merger with Toyota Tsusho America filed 14 March 2025 [A]. The facility count is from Radius's completion release of 10 July 2025 [A]. Limits: Radius is a US company whose accounts also contain an electric-arc steel mill in Oregon and 50 Pick-N-Pull retail yards, so its losses are not purely a scrap-yard result, and only part of its footprint is Canadian; one company is not the industry. The widely reported enterprise value of about US$1.34B and the premium to the undisturbed price were left off this record because no primary document stating them was opened. No Canadian revenue, margin or tonnage series was found at all — ISED's Canadian Industry Statistics page for NAICS 4181 returned a server error on the dates checked, so the Annual Wholesale Trade Survey figures that anchor the neighbouring wholesale records are missing here. That environmental permitting is the binding barrier, and that export-market access governs volumes, is industry knowledge and was not sourced. The cut factor is analyst judgment.
Where the industry talks
The associations, forums and events where people in this trade actually talk shop — where to listen before entering, and where the first customers are found. Each link was opened on the date shown.
National body for scrap processors, brokers and consumers of ferrous and non-ferrous metals, paper, plastics; founded 1941. Its About page says 'hundreds of member companies' without a number.
'More than 1,700 companies in over 40 countries', per its About page; US-based with regional chapters.
ReMA's annual scrap-recycling convention and trade show; next edition Nashville, April 12-15, 2027, per the site.
CARI's annual convention; 86th edition Niagara Falls, June 15-17, 2027, per the events page, which also lists regional Next Gen and Consumers' Night events.
Vancouver-published (Baum Publications) trade magazine and weekly newsletter for recycling, scrap and waste operators and dealers.
GIE Media monthly for the scrap and recycling trade (founded 1963), with a Scrap Recycling supplement; June 2026 issue listed. Blocked automated access.
Independent forum for scrappers and yard operators with buy/sell boards for the US and Canada; blocked automated access, so recent activity not confirmed here.
r/Scrap is inactive (posted as available for adoption in 2026) and was left off. The Automotive Recyclers of Canada site is behind a bot wall and was not confirmed.
Software serving this industry
Vertical software markets filed along the same branch of NAICS — who sells to these businesses, and who an entrant would have to displace.