why do people collect scrap metal/ aluminum, and what’s it used for/worth?

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why do people collect scrap metal/ aluminum, and what’s it used for/worth?

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10 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Metal can be melted down and re-used.

Scrapyards (generally) first check to see if any of it can be re-used as is. (This is common for, say, cars.) If not, it gets melted down and re-sold.

Metal is (relatively) easy to do; you don’t really need to process it beforehand like you do with, say, plastic or mixed junk. And there’s a lot of metals worth a lot of money (copper, for example).

That’s often why yards will pay less for “mixed scrap” because they *do* have to process it (i.e. sort it and take out all the rubber/plastic/etc that’s invariably in there).

People collect it for money. Aluminum cans are common because people can collect them through the trash and turn them in.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The recycle yards sell it to smelters to be reused.

Worth varies dramatically by type. You could bring in copper piping from a DIY plumbing job and make $3 a pound, or old galvanized steel chain link fencing from your house and get 20 cents. Lots of places also buy electric motors like old ceiling fans, brass fittings like hose spigots, aluminum cans, etc. At my parents place, we’d do DIY jobs around the house and save the scrap, if we saw something by the road we might stop and grab it, and we’d do a monthly scrap run and get ~$30-$50 for a truckload.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Recycle Yards will melt/smelt it and sell it.

About 8 years ago, I parked my car at the time on the street. Garbage truck came by with the claw thing still out and absolutely crushed one side of it. After all the settlement with city/etc, I still had the car so I drove it to the local recycling center. They weighed me + the car on the way in and weighed just me on the way out. Gave me like $400 for the value of the scrap.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It can be reused again and again and reusing it is a lot cheaper than digging the ore out of the ground and processing it.

Anonymous 0 Comments

To ACTUALLY answer your question…. People “collect” these metals to sell them to scrap yards. Depending on the day and the state of the economy scrap prices fluctuate. Copper is one of the most common and most valuable metals to scrap.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Scrap prices have tanked…. So it’s different now. This was years ago..

I had a buddy who had a side hustle of collecting scrap. Cans, bottles, stoves left in alley ways, copper, pipes, anything with metal.

He would sort things into piles in his backyard based on common metals.

There was a scrap yard about 5 miles away. They weigh all the different metals by the pound and give you money for it. Like this. I met here has copper wire in it so here’s x amount of money…

He would make enough money doing this to pay for 3 vacations a year to anywhere he wanted to go- for him, usually Mexico.

But it was annoying because he could not pass up scrap when he saw it and we always had to stop to pick it up.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Both are highly recyclable and worth money. Save it up, take it to a scrap yard, get some extra cash. Same for copper.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Former neighbour had a skip in his drive for scrap metal, last time I spoke to him it was £1200/tn for Aluminium and £1500/tn Copper. (Few years back now).

He’d chuck any of the two in the skip and load it onto his flatbed to take to the scrap dealer. It paid for his annual holiday just by hoarding metals, even crushed beer cans went in there.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Scrap value depends on location. It’s low if you are landlocked and high if you are near a port city since most of it ends up on a boat.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Not exactly an ELI5, but I want to provide more context on the scrap metal market/technology.

I worked on an analyzer device that use high power laser and optical sensor to analyze metal composition. Our end customers are big scrap metal yards.

Scrap aluminum can come from soda can, cars, doors, etc… It is also mixed up with other metals. This mix of aluminum contains different types of alloy (soda cans are 3xxx, aircraft often uses 7xxx, etc). The whole scrap mix can melted to liquid and then molded into recycled metal. Except, this scrap mix wouldn’t be good for anything as the composition is not controlled.

Scrap yard often has a very complex sets of equipments that can sort out different metal scraps based on their property: steel via magnets, bronze/brass via color, and different types of aluminum based on Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS). By isolating the bronze/brass, they can smelt that and resell the raw material at much higher price than scrap.

Within aluminum, being able to determine alloy/compositions of each scrap piece can allow scrap yards to create different “grades” of aluminum smelt batches. The lower grades can be sold to foreign countries. The high-end stuffs (think 7xxx for aircraft, 6061 for commercial uses) can be sold to manufacturers to use in conjunction with/in place of aluminum that are mined from the ground.

Aluminum recycling is a huge market recently due to the environmental concerns related to bauxite mining. The EU has requirements of how much Aluminum needs come from recycled source coming into effect soon. In the past, recycled aluminum are often low grade since there wasn’t a technology to sort scraps based on composition. In the last few years, that is changing.

When I deal with customers, they often mention loses in the hundred thousands per day if a sorting line is interrupted.