ABC Recycling connects metal recycling and community

For more than a century, ABC Recycling has grown alongside the communities it serves. Founded in 1912, the fourth-generation family business is Western Canada's largest privately owned metal recycling and processing company.

Headquartered in Burnaby, B.C., the company's 11 locations stretch from Vancouver Island through the Pacific Northwest and into northern Alberta and down to the U.S., with a presence built on competitive pricing, logistics capability, and longstanding customer relationships. Yet behind the piles of ferrous and non-ferrous metal is an even deeper story, one rooted in family legacy and an intentional effort to connect that history to the communities ABC serves today.

A fourth-generation family business

For Karen Alko, director of community relations, the work is personal. ABC Recycling was founded by her great-grandfather and grandfather, who began collecting scrap with a horse and buggy as Jewish immigrants looking for a way to make a living at a time when employment opportunities in Vancouver were limited.

Over time, the business grew from peddling and salvage into a full-service metal recycling and brokerage operation. More than a century later, the company remains family owned. Across four generations, the family has carried forward a belief that success should translate into tangible support through community outreach, partnerships with Indigenous communities, local environmental cleanups, food security initiatives, and hands-on employee volunteering.

"It's always been a value," Alko says. "My great-grandparents and grandparents always believed in the importance of giving back. And that is a core value that's been passed down through the generations."

A new generation of recycling leadership

Alko didn't grow up assuming she would join the family company. Her mother only entered the business later in her own career — in the 1980s, during a challenging economic period — and Alko's early interests were more rooted in the arts. She completed a liberal arts degree followed by graduate studies in business administration, initially considering work in the arts nonprofit sector before eventually turning her attention back to the family business.

Over time, Alko realized the opportunity wasn't just about scrap recycling. It was about stepping in to help guide and steward a multi-generational family business with deep community ties.

That realization shaped her role within the company, pushing her to think more deliberately about how ABC could give back and how its values could be reflected in everyday actions.

"I did start to take a deeper look at the values and how we could be more intentional about the work that we're doing and ensure that we remain a values-based family business," she says.

Part of that shift came through governance work. About two decades ago, ABC joined a national family-enterprise organization and began working with a family advisor to formalize elements like governance, a code of conduct, and the ethos the ownership group wanted to uphold.

ABC's centennial in 2012 offered a moment for reflection. Reaching 100 years in business prompted the family to step back and look more closely at the company's origins and the principles that had carried it forward.

"When we had our hundredth anniversary, [we were] thinking, ‘Wow, this is huge.' We've been around for a hundred years," Alko says. "So we started to look at our story, our origin story, and the importance of that. So it's all kind of connected."

Beyond corporate philanthropy to community engagement

Today, ABC grounds its community efforts in a clearly articulated mission.

"We have a social purpose, and it is to preserve the world's resources and strengthen the lives of our people and communities," Alko says. "That social purpose is kind of like our North Star."

For Alko, it's less about more conventional forms of philanthropy and more about using the company's strengths to make a lasting impact.

"It goes beyond the cheque writing," she says, "[It is] really looking at how we can leverage our strengths and what we do best and have a real impact on our people and communities."

ABC's outreach combines shared company-wide goals with local discretion, allowing each yard to respond to the needs of its own community. That local flexibility drives how each scrapyard selects charities and volunteer activities.

"We do have guidelines," Alko says, "but we also like to give a little bit of autonomy to [each] location because they know their community best."

One of the tools ABC uses to guide that work is an internal structure that helps align volunteer and donation efforts across different regions: quarterly themes. For example, the first quarter of 2026 focuses on food security, encouraging locations to select a food-related charity or choose volunteer activities aligned with that need.

Supporting Indigenous communities through partnership

One of the most notable areas of ABC Recycling's community strategy in recent years has been Indigenous engagement. Alko says the focus grew out of relationships the company had already been building with Indigenous communities, as well as broader calls for corporate accountability following the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. In particular, Call to Action 92 asks corporate Canada to adopt the principles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. ABC's evolving approach, she says, aligns with those expectations.

ABC formalized its commitment to reconciliation through an Indigenous Peoples Commitment Policy in 2019, and the company is participating in the Partnership Accreditation in Indigenous Relations (PAIR) program through the Canadian Council for Indigenous Business.

For Alko, the emphasis isn't just on programs, it's on how the company shows up, learns, and avoids the pitfalls of helping without listening.

Training plays a role in that foundation. ABC requires Indigenous cultural awareness training for employees as part of building internal understanding before expecting external relationships to succeed.

What the ABC team has learned, says Alko, "Is the importance of consultation and not just walking onto First Nations land and saying, this is what we can do for you, but working with communities and finding out what they need, how we can work together so that it's like a win-win situation."

Through hands-on training and facility tours, ABC also shares technical knowledge that Indigenous communities can apply to their own cleanup and recycling efforts. Teaching communities practical skills, such as safe removal of refrigerants from appliances and draining of fluids from end-of-life vehicles, better-equips them to manage materials locally and on their own terms.

How Donate at the Gate turns scrap metal into community support

Another of ABC's more distinctive initiatives is "Donate at the Gate," a program run at each yard that invites customers to donate the value of their scrap to local charities.

For ABC, Donate at the Gate offers something more relational than traditional corporate giving. It turns everyday drop-offs into a shared local effort between customers and the yard team.

"Sometimes [customers] come in with material and they don't necessarily want to get paid for it," Alko says. ABC Recycling takes the value of that drop and donates it to the local charity designated to receive proceeds that month.

The numbers help illustrate scale. In 2025, ABC's Donate at the Gate program raised over $72,000 company-wide. ABC is very intentional about where that help lands: small organizations, local causes, and the kinds of community groups that often struggle for visibility.

Supporting local communities through recycling

ABC's Kelowna yard raised more than $12,000 last year and presented a cheque to the Okanagan Forest Task Force, an organization that tackles illegal dumping in backcountry areas. To underpin their support, ABC volunteers joined the task force team on cleanup missions by providing equipment and recycling recovered metal.

The Burnaby scrapyard team selected an organization called Dan's Legacy, which supports programming for local youth. Alko says the yard raised about $3,000 for the organization, an impactful amount for smaller community groups.

ABC also partners with local hospital foundations in communities where its yards have long-standing ties. In Burnaby, where the company has operated its head office and primary facility since the 1970s, many employees rely on the Burnaby Hospital, making the support a natural extension of the company's presence in the neighbourhood.

On Vancouver Island, ABC has taken a similarly hands-on approach with Campbell River Hospital, partnering on an annual scrap metal challenge that encourages local businesses to donate the value of their scrap to the foundation. The proceeds are directed to the hospital, turning everyday recycling activity into a practical fundraising tool for local health care.

Building a culture of volunteerism

ABC has formalized employee volunteering through a policy that provides 16 paid volunteer hours per year, per employee. While the goal is to remove barriers, Alko is candid about the fact that participation is still a work in progress.

"It [can be] an ongoing challenge . . . to get people engaged," she says."Not every employee takes advantage of it. Some employees are much more engaged than others."

To foster engagement and connection, Alko leads a social purpose working group that brings together an ambassador from each location for monthly check-ins. The group shares volunteer ideas, discusses themes, and helps build momentum across the organization. `

Tracking participation is another practical hurdle. Still, the company is beginning to quantify impact. ABC Recycling recorded 1,558 volunteer hours collectively last year. Alko says this measure helps show progress and creates a feedback loop that informs the next year's goals.

Community engagement as a business advantage

Community engagement in recycling is often discussed in terms of brand reputation, public perception, and social license. Alko acknowledges those realities, but frames it as something deeper: a way to stand out in a crowded market while building a workplace people feel proud of.

"There's a lot of competition out there. There's a lot of noise," she says. "If the choice [was] to do business with a company that did nothing in the community or a company that's super engaged . . . [to me] it's kind of a no-brainer."

She also points to workforce feedback as a signal that the effort is landing internally.

"We survey our employees, and year after year, the feedback comes back consistently that they appreciate working for a values-based business. They appreciate the impact we have in the communities. That says a lot."

In practice, ABC Recycling's community outreach has become a differentiator in a competitive market and a foundation for employee engagement, linking community relationships directly to long-term business resilience.

What's next for ABC Recycling?

ABC has expanded through acquisitions in recent years, growing its presence across Western Canada and into the United States. However, Alko says the company is intentionally pausing major geographic growth for now to focus on strengthening internal systems and its people, particularly after a challenging 2024 market year for the industry.

ABC Recycling is exploring training and development to continue building workforce capability and investing in its people. Outside of operations, Alko's community engagement priorities are concrete: increased volunteer utilization, continued growth of Donate at the Gate, and completing Phase 3 of the PAIR Indigenous relations program.

"I would love to get to a place where it's not just me . . . running the community relations in our organization," she adds, pointing to the potential for a larger team as the program matures. "We could do much more."

And then there's the next generation. There are currently nine potential next-gen ABC members, ranging from age 5 to 25. Although the intention is for them all to be owners in the future, none are in the business yet.  Some have completed summer work or internships, and the family is increasingly focused on engagement and stewardship with those coming up.

"It's about exposing them to the different opportunities," Alko says of the career pathways available. "There's finance, there's logistics, there's technology . . . there are so many different things."

For Alko, that range of opportunity mirrors her own path: joining a scrap and recycling company not because she was expected to, but because she saw how a legacy business can evolve, stay relevant, and still remain grounded in community.

In the recycling industry, it's easy to talk about sustainability in terms of diverted tonnes and closed-loop systems. ABC Recycling's story suggests a parallel kind of circularity built around people: customers who donate scrap value, employees who volunteer time, and communities that see a recycler not as a fenced yard at the edge of town, but as a valued neighbour.

This article originally appeared in the July/August 2026 issue of Recycling Product News.