In 2009 thieves stole a two tonne Henry Moore sculpture - worth £3 million - from a park, and the police eventually reported that it had most likely been sold for £1500 worth of scrap value.
It’s a problem in the Netherlands in exactly the same way.
Trains couldn’t run because the copper lines were stolen; a famous statue was likewise demolished and rebuilt.
This article writes about the background and the final days of a copper thief in the Netherlands. He is one of the fried ones, that is how his identitiy was found out. The article is in Dutch, but the pictures ( of his parents, girlfriend and friends) and google translate may help.
It’s very common here, in Ontario, but not as bad as it used to be; the authorities make scrapyards accept scrap only by traceable payment methods now. That strategy has been employed in a lot of jurisdictions across North America, and it works.
They’re a problem if they’re the thieving variety - ones who break into vacant (heck, sometimes even occupied) dwellings and strip everything bare or steal manhole covers or other metallic improvements in public right-of-ways.
But there are plenty of legit scrappers, and they fulfill a similar function to detritivores in nature. Not glamorous, but important nonetheless.
I do a little scrapping myself, mostly cans and the like. Some scrapyards/recyclers are more legit than others. The one I use has cameras all over the facility (you may not think you’re being watched, but you are), and for anything other than pop or food cans they require a picture ID and they keep info on you and your vehicle(s). Most of what I bring in is fairly innocuous, but my contractor friend brings in all sorts of stuff, like copper and brass, and he has to show that he has a legit reason for having it or is the legal owner. In general, people stealing scrap don’t use that yard. In one case I know of, a couple of meth-heads peeled the aluminum siding off a house and tried to cash in at that yard. As they were neither the owner of the house nor could produce credentials proving they were siding installers (they said they had replaced it) they wound up arrested. After that, local meth-heads took their house rinds elsewhere I guess.
But yes, scrappers ARE a problem all over. People pilfer jobsites all the time. Sometimes the owner/contractor doesn’t care - if you’re tearing down a shed or peeling off an old roof and a scrapper wants to haul some or part of it away and you were just going to throw it away anyhow, why not? Saves you the cost of having someone haul it away. But it’s usually polite for the scrapper to ask prior to digging through the dumpster. Sometimes thousands of dollars of materials or tools will disappear from a site. My contractor buddy has been known to hire overnight security for job sites.
During the depths of the Great Recession I was involved in a situation where scrappers wanted to steal dirt! Not sure if they were going to resell it or use it for gardening, but it was an odd situation.
It isn’t a serious problem here but it probably happens at least once a week. The house next to me, after it had been empty for a month, got hit and pretty much destroyed by some copper thieves. Around this area your chances of getting caught seem about 50/50. Enough scrap dealers have been prosecuted and convicted over the years that there isn’t the market for the more obvious things but there are enough “garbage night gatherers” picking trash and recycling it that a 100% crack-down just wouldn’t be possible.
Aluminum is hardly worth the effort unless you have a lot of it as the price is more like 30 cents a lb. In the last 9 months or so, took a set of 5 aluminum truck wheels in to have them recycled. I think when all was said and done, I made like $22 dollars on the deal, and it was a lot of trouble to lug those heavy things to the recycling place, wait in line, and do all that just for $22 bucks. I recycled them pretty much because my other option was to leave them out for the heavy trash pickup (or for someone to pilfer from the curb) and this seemed more responsible than putting them in the landfill.
I think the thing that bugs me is that these people are willing to do thousands of dollars of damage and inconvenience for $20 in copper wire or pipes. It’s a lot of effort to fuck stuff up, and then get such a tiny payout, and it’s infuriating to the people on the short end of the stick.
Unless the building is very remote — and the one to which I have a benevolent connection although not a christian is in the middle of a town ( and has installed SmartWater and zone alarms to prevent this ) doing so will be both noisy and noticeable. And heavy. Last year at Foxton the thieves had to leave their van behind when it sunk in the mud due to the weight of the lead they had stolen.
As I said in my last paragraph. However one just applies for a faculty. Considering all the weird stuff churchs’ do to change the interior ( the church I mentioned went from pews to office chairs and installed a lavatory in the tower, and a kitchen area in the back of the nave ) this is OK — I love tradition, but not where it will never be seen.
In the years after Katrina on the Gulf Coast there were a lot of empty houses in many neighborhoods. Lots of people evacuated, looked at the television, and literally never came back. Since they didn’t terminate their ownership it would take years to process the abandoned homes. During which time, of course the utilities were cut off. When people finally came around to purchase these fixer-uppers from the bank they learned the hard way to carefully inspect the attic. Scrappers would get into the attic and cut out all the wires running to the various rooms. They would leave the wires in the walls since that was too much trouble to remove. People would buy the house as is, have the power turned back on and nothing would work. The walls would have to be torn down and the houses completely rewired. An expensive fix especially if it wasn’t in the budget.
When we were stationed in the Macon, GA area about a decade ago theft of bronze plaques from veterans’ graves for scrap was a problem. Amid much publicity they cracked down on the scrapyards, so maybe it helped?
Theft of catalytic converters from vehicles (particularly SUVs and trucks with easy access to vehicle underside) has been common in recent years when metal spot prices spike. Palladium, rhodium, gold, and platinum are present in low quantities in most (or all?) late model vehicles’ catalytic converters.
In terms of frequency of media coverage, 2011-2012 seems to be the peak era for scrap metal motivated theft.
I have read in the news about cast iron manhole covers being stolen. For $5 or less in scrap value depending on market timing and cover weight, it hardly seems worth the effort and risk to steal and transport a heavy slug of metal.
As others have mentioned, copper wiring in abandoned homes and construction sites has been a common target.
A buddy of mine works at Lowe’s. He said the highest theft item is copper plumbing fittings. So much so that they installed a dedicated camera to watch that area.
Which… seems odd to me. Even if I stuffed my pockets with copper fittings, how much could they possibly be worth?
We’ve had to replace stolen tree grates as recently as this winter (Chicago) so someone must still be finding iron worth the effort.
It is some what.
If you leave anything out at the curb to be collected on those few days when your town will collect them, if there is any metal on it, it will be stripped off over night before the truck can pick it up.
Now you might think that this in’t a problem until you realize that the guys in the truck aren’t going to spend time picking up all of the myriad of leftover parts strewn around at curbside.
They’ll leave it…whats left of it. They may even radio back to have a squad car come out and ticket you. No amount of, “but that was all in one piece when I left it here at 11 last night” is going to get you out of that ticket.
Copper goes for a few bucks a pound, and $20 is enough to buy some crack. They aren’t trying to pay the lease on their BMW.
It is a big problem where i live, and i dont live in a big city.
If you go away like on vacation, you may very well come home to find your house broken into and all the copper ripped out of the walls, and your appliances too.
Easier for them to pull off out in the country, they dont get noticed, and the cops dont like to investigate much.
A man had passed away and his house was vacant until his family could get down here to deal with it, one day i noticed the siding had been torn away, so i called it into the country sheriff, no one came out during the time i waited.
By the time some one came to investigate it, like 2 months later, the house was destroyed, totally gutted, all wiring gone, all plumbing gone, load bearing studs cut, appliances destroyed etc, the house had to be torn down.
Ive seen new home constructions in the cities raped overnight before the house was even finished.
A better way to think of it is that the retail price is an overly generous upper limit on scrap value. Checking I see I can get a 10-pack of 3/4" copper elbows for a little over $8. The scrap value of that isn’t a whole lot. And the volume they take up in your clothing is significant. Maybe some other items are “denser” but not by too much.
It would make a lot more sense to steal so many other small, easily fenced stuff.
But, as we all know, street criminals are stupid. So maybe it does happen.
I work just outside of East St. Louis, IL. For a while, our internet and phones would go down about once a month, as copper thieves snipped ~100 yds of phone wire at a time to sell for scrap. The phone company would come in, replace and bury the new line. And in about a month, the scrappers would come back for the next 100 yds still aboveground.
I believe there was an attempt to deal with it on the demand side, but even the phone company had no luck threatening the scrap yards. It finally stopped for good when that entire run of phone line had been replaced and buried.
I think it’s a big problem everywhere. Copper, for sure, but just about anything metal, will be taken. On the one hand, it sucks to have your stuff stolen* on the other hand, it’s nice to be able to put scrappable garbage by the road and know it’ll be gone within a few hours. The next time you’re having work done on your house and they want to charge you a ‘disposal’ fee for the old water heater or furnace or (metal) siding etc, just tell them to leave it and you’ll take care of it. Watch how quickly they’ll waive the fee since they’re charging you to ‘dispose’ it so that they can sell it. Even if they do leave it, any of that stuff out by the curb, like I said, will be gone in short order.
Another thing that gets stolen left and right is wooden pallets (and only 40x48 4 ways, they won’t even steal the Chep ones) . People will show up, even right in the middle of the day, throw them all in the back of their pickup truck and drive off. If we’re lucky, we’ll catch them doing it and we can have them arrested, but usually it either happens at night or they’re in and out so fast we don’t even realize it.
The police in our (small) town know that we sell our pallets to ONE person, he only shows up during business hours and he knows our names. If they catch someone taking pallets at 2am, don’t call us, they have a ‘standing order’ to just arrest them and press charges. If there’s some kind of issue or question, they can just hold them until the morning, but no one has permission to be taking anything from behind our building in the middle of the night…no matter what they say.
*A friend of mine had some of his copper lineset stolen. We’re talking about just the foot or two from the condenser to the building. Someone blew off all his coolant for probably a pound of copper.
Several years ago, Minnesota passed a state law that requires all scrap dealers to:
- keep records of each purchase, with a description of the items purchased, date, time, & location.
- a photocopy of the identification of the seller.
- description, identification, & license plate # of the vehicle used by the seller.
- video surveillance of each purchase transaction.
- make payments only via check or electronic transfer to a bank account.
This documentation must be retained for a minimum of 3 years, and be available to any law enforcement officer without requiring a warrant. Also, law enforcement officers are allowed to inspect their premises & storage facilities during any business hours, without needing a warrant.
Since passage of this law (and some strict & highly-publicized enforcement of it), the problem of scrapping has become pretty minor.