Basically the title why is it valuable enough for ppl to steal meters of copper from train rails but the copper wire you get in the store is dirt cheap. I just don’t understand the difference I guess
Edit: damn apparently it’s much more complex than I thought, thanks for all the comments!
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Have you bought copper wire before? It isn’t all that cheap. A lot of what you think may be copper can actually be copper clad aluminum.
Copper isn’t particularly valuable, but it isn’t cheap either. The people stealing the copper aren’t looking to make a great deal of money. Mostly they’re looking to make enough for their next fix. The scrap yards likely know that the people are selling stolen copper and will pay them significantly less than the commodity price of copper–which is around $4/pound (a little less than $0.25 per troy ounce (gold is around $2000 per troy ounce, and silver is about $25 per troy ounce). The amount of copper required to get their fix isn’t all the great even considering the discount the scrapper is buying it at–you can easily fit it inside a shopping basket. Another reason it is popular to steal is that it is very easy to fence–melted copper is pretty much untraceable.
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