The view from southwest Adams Street does not do justice to the towering pile of scrap at A. Miller & Company.

Only the top of the heap is visible. To get the full effect, go down a block toward the Vanna Whitewall statue at the corner of Edmund and southwest Washington streets. Look up and behold a mountain of garbage, a stone's throw from the UFS store, a few blocks from a new baseball stadium.

Or go inside A. Miller's fence along southwest Adams Street, where huge junk piles outside complement smaller scrap piles inside a dirty warehouse. Bales of shiny crushed aluminum soda cans, weighing about 3,000 pounds each, share space with smaller bales of insulated copper, aluminum siding, window frames and old radiators from cars and air conditioners.

"It might not be the prettiest sight to some people, but it's all inventory to us," says Alan Miller, the third generation of Millers in the scrap business.

The company's other division, Allied Iron & Steel, is down toward Bartonville, at the foot of Clarke Street. A. Miller and Allied are the same company, Alan Miller says. Different names make it easy for customers - iron and steel to Allied, all other metals to A. Miller.

At Allied, nearly a football field-length of junked cars, probably 35 feet high, dominate what seems like an open-air warehouse of junked iron and steel. Higher still, there's the shredder, a huge machine that can literally beat a car into fist-sized pieces in 45 seconds.

"I bet Alan told you we were recycling before they coined the term," says his cousin, John, who runs Allied Iron and Steel.

Crushed cans and shredded cars - reusable garbage is the family business.

A. Miller and Company is the last family-owned and the only locally-owned scrap yard in Peoria.

Alan and John's grandfather, Abraham Miller, started a fur trading business in the 1920s and moved into trading metals, rags, tires and auto parts by World War II. By the 1960s, scrap metal had taken over. Abraham's sons, Harold and the late Irv Miller, helped expand the business, buying the old Peoria County Landfill property for Allied, installing one of the first car shredders in the area.

Harold, 84, is Alan's father. He still shows up for work at the dusty A. Miller office along southwest Adams Street and he can list the names of scrap yard families he's seen come and go - Heller, Bork, Erlichman - replaced by corporate metal yards like Allied's neighbor, Behr Recycling and Alter Metal Recycling, just north of Bartonville's Keystone Steel Mill.

City leaders may occasionally talk about beautifying the unsightly messes along the southern gateway where the city's scrap yards do business. The media may occasionally report on the rise in theft of copper and catalytic converters, metals thieves may try to sell to scrap yards like A. Miller. Environmentalists may worry about levels of toxic chemicals released when metals are crushed, torched or melted down, which is what happens at scrap yards like A. Miller and Allied.

But scrap yards are ground zero of a global metal recycling industry.

PTA moms in station wagons and homeless men with shopping carts take garbage bags full of aluminum cans to A. Miller. Electricians, plumbers, roofers, farmers, home remodelers or demolition contractors take truck loads of copper, tin, aluminum, brass, stainless steel, and/or lead scrap leftover from work projects. Towing and auto parts companies take in wrecked vehicles or cars stripped down to the least-usable parts. Peddlers scour alleys and backyards, searching for broken-down appliances, air conditioners that might bring a buck on the scrap market.

A. Miller's weighs each load and pays each customer so much per ton or pound, depending on the metal, depending on a metal's going price in a commodities market where prices can rise and fall as regularly as a barrel of oil. Steel mills, on the other hand, set prices once a month.

The company then processes it for resale to refineries and steel mills, including Keystone, around the country and throughout the world. For the Miller cousins, trading scrap is like trading stocks, prices rise and fall based on supply and demand.

"We're coming off record historic high prices for metals," says John Miller who majored in finance in college. "But they've drastically dropped in the last two months, and they're still dropping."

Alan Miller, 47, traded commodities in Chicago for several years after college graduation before he returned to work in the family business.

"The party's over," he says.

Prices had climbed steadily for the last three or four years. Just last week, A. Miller was paying customers less than $2 a pound for copper, down from record highs of more than $3 a pound this summer. Aluminum cans went from 75 cents to 50 cents a pound.

Demand for raw materials, precipitated in part by Asia's building boom, led to skyrocketing metal prices, a global economic crisis helped send prices falling.

"We take a risk," Alan says. The company will lose money on materials they bought last month but haven't sold yet.

A global market also played a role in the decline of small, locally-owned scrap yards. As long-distance transportation became increasingly important to business, national metal recyclers began buying up the smaller yards.

"It's a hard change to see when you are a family business, trying to compete with the consolidated yards," John Miller says. At 58, he's worked in the family business 44 years.

His father, the late Irv Miller, was Abraham's son and Harold's brother.

"My dad always told me to find something other than working in the scrap business," John Miller says. "I think it's a great business."

Pam Adams can be reached at (309) 686-3245 or padams@pjstar.com.