The scrap heap at the Unalaska landfill is a metal recycler’s dream. You’ll see 70s-era cars and stoves, and plenty of valuable stainless steel and aluminum. City officials think there could be hundreds of millions of pounds of scrap on this island. It’s enough to make a metal recycler rich, but more than most can handle.

In 2008, an attempt to clear the junk failed when a contractor walked off the job after removing the biggest pieces of metal from the island. That caught Ron Moore’s attention last year. He and his wife Yvonne operate R.L. Moore Metal Recycling near Norfolk, Virginia. She found a news story about Unalaska’s recycling problem online and asked her husband to take a look.

“It was a man sitting beside a big pile of scrap that he’d paid out a lot of money to get hauled away,” says Ron Moore. “He still had the scrap and he looked pretty sad. And I said, ‘Well, all scrap people ain’t like that, you know.’”

The picture of Unalaska’s scrap stuck with him. He was so confident his family could clear the island that he paid a visit last year. But Public Utilities Director Dan Winters was skeptical at first.

“I was kind of hesitant,” says Winters. “You know, bit once, their fault, bit twice, my fault. We kind of put him off until he came to town. And then once he came to town, we [saw] he was serious, put a contract together with him, and he’s got a real classy operation going on.”

City council approved a $60,000 contract with Moore’s company in May. The family moved here to collect, sort, and sell the scrap. They also brought a million-dollar machine that can compress metal into smaller blocks for shipping.

Before Moore even set foot on the island, he says the company blew through their payment from the city. But he also says this is par for the course. Scrap recyclers need to have enough cash on hand to pay the bills while they wait for good market conditions. It’s why Moore called scrap recycling “Russian roulette.”

Metal prices have dropped since he arrived in Unalaska, but he’s not worried. In the past three weeks, the Moores have moved almost a million pounds of scrap off the island. Anything they don’t want to sell now because of a weak market will be shipped and stored until prices recover.

With any luck, Unalaska’s trash will become the Moore family’s fortune. And when they do sell off the scrap metal, the community could see more benefit than just a smaller landfill.

“We take 10 percent straight off the top and we take that 10 percent and we split it in half,” says Moore. “We give half to the schools and the other half to the local churches, and it’s split up amongst all of them. We’ve been doing that for 20 years and the Lord’s blessed us for that.”

The Moores plan to stay in Unalaska through the end of summer and then operate their business out of Anchorage after that. They hope to spend the rest of their summers recycling scrap in the Aleutian Islands.

While the Moores are on the island, the landfill has indefinitely extended its community scrap collection project, which was set to end June 15. You can still drop cars and appliances at the landfill, so long as they’re free of lubricant, fuel and other toxic substances.