I’ve always wondered this do they sell it to another recycling company down the road? If cans are selling for $1 a pound how much profit do they make?
In: 0
The ultimate destination of your recycled cans is a giant machine that eats dirty, randomly-shaped aluminum, melts it down, and spits out clean aluminum in shapes that factories like.
Your local recycling facility probably does *not* have one of these melty machines. And the places that *do* have one of these melty machines probably do not want to deal with your loose cans. Running the melty machine is only worth it if they can do it in *biiig* batches, so they want *biiig* bales of the stuff.
Your local recycling facility is most likely a company that has crushing machines that can eat random scrap cans and spit out the bales that the melty machine company actually wants. So they buy your loose cans, crush them up into bales, and sell the bales. That’s what they are actually in the business of: dealing with your loose crap, and turning it into something the *actual* recyclers can handle. So they can buy your loose cans at, say, $1 a pound, turn them into bales, and sell the bales for, I dunno, $1.10, and pocket the difference. The baling process alone adds value, and they are creating that value.
There will always be exceptions. Some recyclers will take the loose stuff and do the whole baling and melting process themselves. But in general, it’s most advantageous to let small independent operators located closer to the people bringing in the loose stuff do the baling separately. That way, the compacted bales can be shipped to the centralized melting place more efficiently, as the bales take up less room, and tend to be less finicky to handle than a bunch of oddly-shaped loose bits.
Latest Answers