Biz Of The Month: Can-Am Recycling Inc

OF THE MONTH Celebrating Earth Day, April 22, 2022 With Can-Am Recycling Inc.

By Dave Hall

Seventy years after their father Saul Pazner launched Pazner Scrap Metal Ltd., his children, Lawrence Pazner and Barbara Cheifetz, have built their own recycling businesses into major players across southwestern Ontario.

Lawrence and Barbara had worked alongside their father while finishing off their education before establishing their own recycling operations.

“I begged my dad to let me come to work for him and I started when I was 14,” Barbara recounts. “We were out of the house before 7 a.m. on Saturdays and since that day, I’ve always been a morning person.”

It was the beginning of what would become a long-established family business.

Four years after Saul closed his business in 1992, Lawrence and Barbara founded Pazner Environmental Ltd. (Pazner.com) and started out by handling scrap metal for local companies, many of them supplying parts to the automotive industry.

By 2002, it had become apparent that plastic scrap was becoming more and more predominant, and Can-Am Recycling Inc. was born. The company began handling post-industrial scrap plastic as the automotive industry concentrated its design efforts on lighter vehicles made with more and more plastic components.

“I would say our business now handles about 98% plastic and that we dabble a little in metal recycling,” explains Lawrence, who worked at BFI Canada for two years after attaining business and economics degrees from the University of Windsor. “It’s been the major change in our business since we opened more than 25 years ago.”

Lawrence focuses on the recycling side of the two companies, Barbara concentrates on the business side — customer service, accounting and customs.

Barbara, who has an education degree from the University of Windsor and a master’s degree in special education from the University of Toronto, taught for five years after graduation and was then a stayat-home mom for 12 years.

But, when Lawrence launched Pazner Environmental in 1996, she decided to join him in the business.

“When it was just Lawrence and I, it was pretty simple, but when we started hiring employees, it became more complicated,” states Barbara. “Thanks to a good accountant, his team and lessons learned from my father, I was able to navigate the business side.”

Her company responsibilities allow her to work from home, but Barbara adds:”Whatever nobody else wants to do falls on my desk.”

Today, more than one million pounds of scrap plastic is sorted and processed monthly at the company’s three Tilbury plants, using shredders and grinders, before the final product — a plastic regrind — is either sold back into the market as an alternative to virgin resin, or sold to a compounder to be made into plastic pellets.

“I believe we play an important role in the automotive sector food chain by diverting plastic from landfills,” Lawrence says. “Plastic has become a growing part of the automotive industry and there is no shortage of scrap plastic to be recycled.”

Can-Am Recycling services southern Ontario, the U.S. Midwest, Kentucky and Tennessee, while Pazner Environmental sells its products globally.

The company also sells its recycled plastic to companies in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Vietnam, which provides entry into the lucrative, but highly regulated, Chinese market.

Can-Am also offers, what is called in the industry, a closed-loop program where scrap plastic is sorted, ground, reprocessed and returned to the original supplier for another use.

Although all of us recycle in some way or another these days, Lawrence points out there is a huge distinction between the materials his companies handle and the everyday blue box recycling items.

“Some of the blue box materials are recyclable and some aren’t, but automotive scrap plastic has a much higher value and 100% of it is marketable,” he explains.

And while volumes may be down a few percentage points from previous years, it’s more than offset by the rising price of commodities, such as plastic, across the globe.

“I see prices stabilizing, but remaining high for the foreseeable future,” indicates Lawrence.

In recent years, the two companies have focused more on human resources and investing in their employees by introducing benefits, profit-sharing and an RRSP matching plan in an attempt to retain employees and save on training costs.

“We’re facing some of the same issues many businesses are facing post-pandemic with potential employees not showing up for interviews or not showing up for work once hired,” he says. “But these new measures have added a lot more stability and dependability to our workforce.”

The company’s head office is located at 165 Queen Street North in Tilbury. Two adjacent building are used for sorting and warehousing.

For more information, visit their website: CanAmRecycling.com.

The owners of Can-Am Recycling Inc. Barbara Cheifetz, (Chief Financial Officer and Vice President) and Lawrence Pazner (President and Chief Executive Officer) are pictured next to a shredder/granulator. The multi-generational, locally owned recycling company operates out of a location in Tilbury. Photo by Rod Denis.