Business View Magazine | February 2019

53 B ased in San Leandro, California, Alco Iron &Metal Company recycles, fabricates, and sells metal products to customers in the United States and internationally. Its activi- ties include the purchase and supply of ferrous and non-ferrous scrap and surplus metal products; stocking and sale of steel, stainless steel, and aluminum; and fabrication and supply of metal products to various industries.The company also provides safe demo- lition of obsolete equipment and any other form of industrial demolition and transformer dismantling services. “Alco was founded in 1953,” recounts Company COO and General Counsel,Michael Bercov- ich.“The founder was the father of our current owners,who worked at a different recycling location in Oakland, and decided to open his own yard. It started in a small, quarter-acre yard in San Leandro.He ran it for many years, incorporated in 1972, and then started to see a lot of growth in the company when his sons took over the day-to-day operations mid- to late-‘80s and early ‘90s. Being on the west coast, the Asian market has always been important and that picked up when the sons took over and became early exporters of scrap material. Starting in the late ‘90s we started to expand our operations where, today, we have five facilities all in the extended Bay area. We’re on about 50 acres, overall.”Those five Alco facilities include two in San Leandro, and one each in Vallejo, Stockton, and San Jose.The company has approximately 200 employees. Bercovich explains that although metal recycling supplies a large percentage of Alco’s revenue the other areas of the business are important to them as well.“We do have a metal distribution business,” he adds,“a metal service center that sells semi-