Full of Scrap: Wendy Neu’s mettle has driven herself, her business

Aug 28, 2012 | 07:00 PM | Lisa Gordon

Tags  Full of Scrap, Wendy Neu, WeRecycle! LLC., Hugo Neu, Lisa Gordon

Whoever coined the adage “It’s a man’s world” apparently forgot to tell English immigrant Wendy Kelman, who arrived in East Brunswick, N.J., as a child in the 1960s.

Her career path might spark confusion among the plethora of women who wed well-heeled men and were only too happy to trade in their working shoes for a closet full of Jimmy Choo stilettos. She entered the secondary metals industry at a time when females were dispatched to the secretarial pool, won over environmentalists, started an electronics recycling company and married one of the most prominent men in the U.S. scrap arena, John Neu.

Wendy Neu’s journey began with the quintessential ideals infused in teens growing up in America: she was determined to make the world a better place. After graduating from college, she took a job as a social worker at a maximum-security prison, the first female—aside from a nun—to work in such a position. “I learned probably the most important lesson of my young 21 years—that life was not fair, and luck had as much to do with one’s situation in life as much as any other factor,” she told attendees at an Association of Women in the Metal Industries (AWMI) meeting. “Changing the world was hard work and I wasn’t very good at it.”....