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Sam (left) and Samuel Emfinger are the latest in three generations of the family to run Emfinger Steel.
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Y Dewey Emfinger was a man who never let anything go to waste. A child of the Great Depression who came of age amid the conservation efforts of World War II, he never really knew any other way. When he started his own business reclaiming and recycling scrap metal in 1949, Emfinger Steel was as much an extension of his own personal ethos as anything else. Decades later his daughter-in-law Jan Emfinger still remembers how, in the course of their walks through the neighborhood, Dewey would stop to collect aluminum cans along their way so they could bring them back to the scrap yard. 6 JANUARY 2016
Y “Back in his era, everything you had, you had to use — and then find another way to use it again,” Jan says. “So recycling made sense to him because you’re using something to its maximum; you’re getting the most out of every item.” When Dewey passed away in September 2003, his son Sam Emfinger took over the family business, continuing his father’s legacy of reclamation. Sam’s own son, Samuel, has since risen to vice president, representing the third generation of the Emfinger clan to devote its energies to reclaiming and reusing. But had it not been born when it
was, Emfinger Steel might not have survived at all. “I don’t think a mom-and-pop shop could start in this industry where we are now,” Samuel says. “The market has gone from something where the whole industry was mom-and-pop stores to something now where it’s bigger and there’s a lot more competition.” The beating heart Samuel describes Emfinger Steel’s role in the metallic circle of life as a collection point. When worn-out scrap from obsolete machinery has reached the end of the line, they separate it into ferrous metals (steel, cast iron, etc.) and non-
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