Aceria de Angola is a company that is turning old weapons — rifles, tanks — into steel beams. It was founded by a baker, whose business was destroyed by the bloody civil war. But the spoils presented an opportunity.

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

Angola’s long civil war ended in 2002, and the country is still recovering today. There’s infrastructure to build. There are long-term injuries to mend. And there’s this question – what should be done with the old tanks and rifles that litter huge tracts of land? NPR’s Eyder Peralta has this story about a company that’s melting weapons and turning them into steel.

EYDER PERALTA, BYLINE: Aceria de Angola has a junkyard in a rural town about two hours from the capital, Luanda.

(SOUNDBITE OF TRUCK REVERSING)

PERALTA: To see the whole place we climb on a two-story scaffold. I see a vast wasteland. The red dirt is covered with crumpled metal, old, rusty cars, mounds of motorcycles and, in the distance, big chunks of tanks languishing in the sun.

(SOUNDBITE OF METAL CLANGING)

PERALTA: A bulldozer picks up the scraps like Legos and drops them into a machine that shreds them into tiny pieces.

(SOUNDBITE OF METAL CRUNCHING)

PERALTA: Luis Silva, the guy who runs this factory, puts his hands on his waist and looks around.

When you look out here, what kind of story does this yard tell you about this country?

LUIS SILVA: (Laughter) It tells me a story of poverty and war.

PERALTA: Silva has done this kind of work in Europe. Out there, he says, the yards are littered with junk that still has some life – cars with some paint left on them. And you also get the remains of a society on the move – steel beams from relatively new buildings and factories being destroyed to make way for new ones.

SILVA: You don’t see here industrial scrap. You look for that and just a small amount of pipes comes from the oil industry. But the rest is old; very old.

PERALTA: Aceria de Angola is the brainchild of Georges Choucair. During the war, he owned a big bakery, but his delivery trucks were destroyed. And when it was all over, he saw a country with the need and means to rebuild. In the steel business, he saw money. But he also saw a parallel between his old life and what would become his new one.

GEORGES CHOUCAIR: Steel is as much important than food. We need food because we need to live, but we need to have a home. And home without steel also nothing.

PERALTA: Of course, he faced many challenges building a factory in a country emerging from war. He had to invest in the power grid so he could get enough electricity, for example. But his love for Angola kept him going, he says. Once the plant was built, one of the first things they did was clear tons of war scraps from Cuito Cuanavale, the site of one of the most intense and historic battles during the Angolan Civil War.

CHOUCAIR: We now can recycle all the scrap, the war scrap, to something amazing, giving life to people.

PERALTA: Back at the factory, Luis Silva shows me how the metal scraps are melted in furnaces, how it’s poured out and turned into what look like long, black beams.

SILVA: After that we start the rolling process.

PERALTA: He says there are still lots of problems here. There are few roads to get scraps out of the center of the country. There are lots of power cuts, and employees often lose family members to what should be treatable diseases. He stops to show me the presses. They squeeze warm steel into thin rebars.

SILVA: And this is the finished product.

PERALTA: There are still problems, he says. But when he sees this new steel made from old scraps, it gives him hope. Eyder Peralta, NPR News, Luanda.

(SOUNDBITE OF TRACEY CHATTAWAY’S “SHIMMER”)

Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Former surgeon general Dr. Vivek Murthy says that underlying many of the most critical public health issues facing America today is an epidemic of loneliness. NPR’s Michel Martin speaks with Dr. Murthy about what that means, and what he thinks should be done about it.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Let’s talk about health and well-being for a few minutes. Often, when we talk about the issues that most concern the leading figures charged with addressing the nation’s health, we think about excess weight or smoking or violence. But the former surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, would like to add something else to that list – loneliness. That’s a subject of a new cover story in The Harvard Business Review. Some 40 percent of American adults say they feel lonely. And a rising number of people say they have no close confidant in their lives.

That’s one reason why Dr. Murthy argues that America is in the midst of a loneliness epidemic. And the consequences of that, he says, are significant enough that businesses, managers and workers should rethink the way they work to think about how to foster more meaningful relationships with colleagues, with whom many people spend more time than with family. To hear more about that, we’re joined now by Dr. Vivek Murthy in our studios in Washington, D.C. Dr. Murthy, thanks so much for speaking with us.

VIVEK MURTHY: Thank you for having me.

MARTIN: So I would imagine that a lot of people wouldn’t think about loneliness as a public health issue. So first of all, tell us why you think it is a public health issue, and then help us understand how you got to thinking that yourself.

MURTHY: Well, years ago, I wouldn’t have thought about loneliness as a public health issue either. But two big things happened in my life that changed that. Number one, I began practicing medicine and seeing patients and quickly realized that the greatest pathology that I saw was not heart disease or diabetes. It was, in fact, loneliness, and it was impacting the ability of my patients to live healthy and fulfilling lives.

But the second thing that happened is, when I began my tenure as surgeon general, I visited communities all across the country – big and small. And what I heard everywhere I went was that people were, in fact, struggling with loneliness. They used different words to describe that feeling and that experience, but the experience was often the same. Some people were struggling with loneliness in the face of illness.

You know, I met moms and dads, for example, who had lost children to drug overdoses and felt profoundly alone in part because of this terrible stigma that surrounds addiction. But even people who weren’t struggling with illness often felt that they were on their own. And this is quite striking despite the boom that we’ve had in technology, especially social technology.

So these two experiences really led me to see that loneliness is not only a profound problem. But when you look at the literature and you understand the science, there are powerful impacts that loneliness can have on our health. And that’s why I began to look at it as an important public health issue that we need to address.

MARTIN: Well, in fact, you used the language of health – like you said, it’s a pathology. I mean, I think when people think of an illness, they think of something that is something physical that has specific symptoms. I mean, does loneliness have those things?

MURTHY: When you look at the data, you find that loneliness is associated with shorter lifespan. And, in fact, the reduction in lifespan from loneliness is similar to the reduction associated with smoking, and it’s, in fact, greater than the impact of obesity. But if you delve even deeper, you see that there’s an association between loneliness and cardiovascular disease, dementia, anxiety and depression. And if you look at even more deeper at the physiology, it’s not too difficult to understand how this may, in fact, come about because loneliness, in fact, creates a stress state in our body.

As human beings, we evolved to be social creatures, and there was a very practical reason for that because, in ancient times, if we had other people that we were connected to, we had a stronger guarantee of a stable food supply. We also had a greater chance of being protected from predators at night. We could all take turns keeping watch around the fire instead of having one person stay up the entire night. And over hundreds and thousands of years, that need for social connection became baked into our nervous system. And so if we are in a lonely state, it actually places us in a state of stress, and chronic stress is associated with increases in cortisol, increases the inflammation in the body, which can damage tissues and ultimately increase our risk of heart disease, obesity and a number of other illnesses.

MARTIN: Why do you say that the work environment needs to address this? Why is that a business problem or work problem?

MURTHY: Well, the truth is that all of us have to think about how we can address the loneliness epidemic across all sectors. But in particular, we need to look at where people spend the bulk of their time, and people are spending the bulk of their time with families, in the workplace, in schools, in social organizations like faith-based organizations. And for many people, spend at least eight hours a day at work. Many spend many more than eight hours a day at work. And for this reason, the impact that the workplace has on our social connections becomes very, very important.

Now, one might think, OK, well, it’s not the job of an employer to really think about whether your employees are lonely or not. There are a couple of reasons you might be interested in doing that. Number one, you recognize that loneliness has an impact on your health. Then, you know that employees who are not healthy can contribute less to the actual business and to the bottom line. The second reason, though, is loneliness is not a phenomenon that occurs in isolation.

But in many ways, loneliness has network effects. When individuals are lonely, they can impact whether people around them feel lonely as well. And so that is, in part, why I think of it as an epidemic. But if you’re an employer, you want to make sure that people in your workplace are feeling connected, so that they can be happier, more productive, healthier and have reduced health care costs and, ultimately, so you have a community that’s thriving instead of a community that’s groaning under the yoke of stress.

MARTIN: That’s Dr. Vivek Murthy. He was the 19th surgeon general of the United States. He was appointed by former President Obama. And he was kind enough to join us in our studios in Washington, D.C. Dr. Murthy, thanks so much for speaking with us.

MURTHY: Thank you for having me.

Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.