DEBBIE ELLIOTT, HOST:
All kinds of businesses are trying to figure out how President Trump's trade wars will affect their bottom lines. This week, he doubled tariffs on imported aluminum and steel to 50%. The White House says it's designed to bolster production in the U.S., but experts say the move could increase costs on everything from cars to homes to canned goods. Joining us now to talk about the impact on one sector of the metals industry is Andrew Lincoln. He owns Lincoln Recycling in Pennsylvania. Welcome to the show.
ANDREW LINCOLN: Thank you for having me, Debbie.
ELLIOTT: Let's start just having you tell us a little bit about how your business works and where your recycled metals end up.
LINCOLN: Sure. We are primarily a metals recycler, and our customer base is retail and then heavy manufacturing. The collection process - we gather at our two facilities in Pennsylvania. And of the metals, we have steel, primarily, and then the nonferrous metals, which aluminum, copper, stainless, brasses. And those get sorted out and sent to consumers domestically, and then some consumers that we export to.
ELLIOTT: Some analysts are saying that in the short term, at least, businesses like yours should get a boost. Is that what you're expecting, and how does that work?
LINCOLN: Yes, we're seeing a slight boost, but it's a little more complicated than that. So a lot of the commodities we trade, say, copper, for instance, there's the COMEX and LME, where these are traded daily. And generally, we like to see stable prices, but slightly elevated, and they are now. That drives more recycling through our organization. The higher the commodity price, the higher I can offer to my customers. What we're seeing right now in the short term, though, because the tariff announcements have been, you know, sort of an on-off switch, the spreads between what copper COMEX is and what I'm actually able to get for the material have widened dramatically. And I'm having some consumers actually in a no-buy position, which puts me in a heartache 'cause I have material coming in that I cannot sell.
ELLIOTT: So you have material coming in that you have to pay a little more for because the prices are up. And then when you try to sell it at the price that it's trading for on the open market, some of your customers are saying, wait, that's a little too high. I'm not going to buy it right now.
LINCOLN: Correct. Everyone's in a pause situation. So if we're all pausing, if consumers that are actually melting the copper to make a brass or make a fixture, to sell it to manufacturers to turn it into a part, everyone in the supply chain is taking a deep pause or a deep breath and trying to figure out, is this price real? Is this going to hold? And so you can just imagine if you have that going through the whole supply chain, it's just going to create a weaker economy because everyone's kind of waiting and seeing what's going to happen.
ELLIOTT: Does that mean that, say, for instance, the cost of my can of green beans is going to go up?
LINCOLN: Yes, that you would pay for, for sure. So ultimately, tariffs arbitrarily pick winners and losers, and it feels not free enterprise and feels very un-American to me. So, I mean, some of my manufacturers that we service, they make products that they're doing a value add. And they have a certain type of steel or a certain type of aluminum that is not produced here in the U.S., and probably won't be even with these tariffs that are coming on. So it's the small niche businesses that get left out in the cold 'cause they can't source their material domestically.
ELLIOTT: So President Trump has been saying that these tariffs are intended to bring that kind of manufacturing back to the U.S. You sound skeptical that that will work.
LINCOLN: I do. I - we can't bring everything back. That's why we need to have strong trading partners, like we do in Canada and Mexico, and rely on other countries. And we can't make everything here in the U.S.
ELLIOTT: That's Andrew Lincoln, owner of Lincoln Recycling, speaking with us from Meadville, Pennsylvania. Thank you so much for your insight.
LINCOLN: Thank you, Debbie.
ELLIOTT: (SOUNDBITE OF OMEGAH RED'S, "BOOKS OF WAR (INSTRUMENTAL)") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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