The metal recycling business is doing well, according to the editor of a trade journal, Resource Recycling. Yet Bill Goldkind says the price of natural gas, which rose by more than 35 percent last year and which is used to melt scrap metal, is hurting his recycling business. Goldkind, president of Crestwood Metal Corp., says natural gas costs his company an additional $250,000, most of which he is unable to pass along to customers.

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HOLBROOK, N.Y. — There are a lot more than empty soda and beer cans being recycled at Crestwood Metal Corp., a family-owned business operating on eastern Long Island for the past 50 years.

With 38 employees working on a five-acre site, the plant recycles 35-40 million pounds of scrap metal annually, sending the raw material to factories producing everything from auto parts to trailer homes.

Crestwood President Bill Goldkind says generating that much scrap metal requires more than just empty cans.

"We recycle auto parts, storm windows, storm doors," Goldkind said. "We also get a lot of government aluminum. I've melted down missile bodies and even some tanks."

Goldkind started the business a half-century ago with his father. He has 10 tractor-trailer drivers on the road at any given time in a five-state area around New York, either picking up materials to be recycled or delivering blocks of recycled metal to manufacturers.

Jerry Powell, the editor of the Portland, Ore.-based trade journal Resource Recycling, said 9,000 communities around the country have door-to-door recycling programs, and that about one-third of the solid waste generated in the United States is recycled.

"We're doing very well," he said.