Metal Recycler Starts Truck Fleet

Upstate Shredding - Weitsman Recycling is the largest, privately-owned scrap metal processing and recycling operation in the East and now operates a fleet of 47 new Western Star 5700XEs. The fleet expects to have 63 of the trucks by the end of 2018.

Headquartered in the Southern Tier region of New York, the company has 17 scrap recycling and processing operations in New York and Pennsylvania. Scrap metal is trucked from the yards to two shredding locations, one in Pennsylvania and one in New York. Once the metal is processed, it’s trucked out again to domestic steel mills or to ports for shipping overseas.

“We need to be able to service the customers exactly when they need to be serviced,” Weitsman said. “And the steel mills are counting on performance from us. They don’t want to hear, ‘the truck didn’t show up.’ They would say, ‘That’s no problem, we’ll just find someone else.’ They’ll replace us.”

Upstate had been using local small trucking firms, which proved unable to keep up with company demand and limited growth. Upstate Shredding - Weitsman Recycling also bought a large number of dump trailers and leased them for $1 a year to owner-operators, but there were still gaps in service that needed to be filled.

“We would stymie our own growth. We couldn’t really grow anymore,” Weitsman said. “We had to do it ourselves to guarantee the service to our customers and to guarantee outbound shipments from our 17 facilities.”

With all of these difficulties, Weitsman decided to start his own fleet. After experimenting with other trucks, he decided that the Western Star 5700XE was the ideal combination of efficiency, performance and ruggedness. The 2018 and 2019 Western Star trucks are now running between the company’s 17 locations, hauling the company’s large round-body dump trailers. The 5700XEs have Detroit DD16 engines with Eaton Fuller transmissions, 13,300-pound front axles and 46,000-pound rear axles.

RELATED: Q&A: Western Star’s Carson on Vocational Trucks