Not hugely so, but there is some. In the graveyard next to my house, scrappers stole a large and beloved grave marker.
The UK passed a scrap metal law a few years back that substantially tightened up regulation and licensing of scrap yards, and it has apparently put a major dent into metal theft. Illegal scrapyards must still operate, but it doesn’t seem like the easiest thing to run on the quiet.
We must have a similar law on the books because scrappers are nil in my area unless you’re a contractor. We also have a town bylaw forbidding us to put old appliances, pallets, etc., out for trash pickup without phoning the DPW and purchasing a special trash sticker (I think it’s $30 or $40).
When our water heater rusted out I called an independent area “clean up” guy to retrieve it. He charged me a flat fee and, in turn, he got the $ for it at the scrapyard.
Same for Missouri. I live in the St Louis area and before they passed this law, it was a daily occurrence, usually several times a day. Several of the homes in the “high rent district” where I work had copper gutters and downspouts. It was nothing for them to come home to find a gutterless house. One time the thieves actually took them while the people were inside eating supper, the residents only noticed it as they were driving away.
The scrappers by me keep a fairly meticulous record of what you take in. About once a year, I take in a load of aluminum cans. While they don’t count the cans or inventory them, they will write “Ten pounds of aluminum cans, mostly ‘X’ brand”. They also copy my license and write a check rather than pay in cash. The paper will regularly have an article of a metal theft where law enforcement will check scrap yards and find it and make an arrest. It has slowed them down significantly, but there are still some people that are pretty dense.
That’s awful, and I couldn’t find an update that it had been located. What an incredible waste of art.
I LOL’d at this.
Some of it goes on here; the one person I know personally who does it gets his metal legitimately. He does construction and home renovation, and some of his colleagues call him to haul their stuff off, so they don’t have to do it.
Here’s a story about a woman whose elderly stepfather died as a result of a copper theft - something nobody knew had happened until it was too late.
Crack? How quaint. More likely heroin.
Around here it seemed to have peaked several years ago when scrap prices were higher. Then we got constant reports. It’s not very frequent now.
I tell you what - if aluminum prices go high again I’ll have to consider finally upgrading to the stucco finish that’s become popular here in Utah.
After the new roof and windows, that is…
That’s a bummer. When we bought a new fridge, they offered to take the old one away for $50. I laughed and said we’d keep it. It wasn’t on the curb for an hour before it was gone.
My record is taking a washer down to the curb and, by the time I wheeled the dryer down, someone was already loading the washer up. I almost missed him taking the dryer off my hands 
Bolding mine.
No you did not. He would have just circled the block for a while. At least in my scrapping days that is what I would do.
I had one fellow that put out a newer lawn mower. He watched while I loaded it. I circled the block & there were two chainsaws, again he watched, around the block I went. Now there was a washer, again he was watching. Another circuit. Look! a dryer. He was no where in sight, but just for grins, I circled again. Low & behold an old electric range. At this point my pickup was full. Looking around I saw that he was in the side yard watching me. I call out to him that I had a load & would be back the next day. I was, but he was no where to be seen, there also was no junk to load either.
I think that he enjoyed watching me load up his trash. I hope that I made his day. I would have enjoyed hearing what tale he told about that incident. I am sure that he thought that I was insane.
I fixed most of his “Junk” & sold them to folks that had uses for them. I rarely actually scrap an entire item. If I can not repair it, I pull the good parts to sell on e-pay & scrap the rest.
Now I have a “real” job. While I work odd hours, it is steady & I have benefits. No more scrapping for me.
It wasn’t located. They did arrest some scrappers in Baltimore doing the same thing in a cemetery and they think that they were responsible for the DC thefts, but they never recovered the marker. I used to walk in the cemetery a lot and the obelisk that was stolen was very close to Tim Russert’s grave. After the robbery, they made getting into the cemetery more restrictive, as if people were walking out with an 11 foot obelisk under their coat. This was a major operation that probably involved the security team.
Fair enough. I’d have guessed you’d move on to the next block to get their stuff before it’s gone rather than hoping this block grows more fruit but then I’ve never been in the curbside salvage business.
I’m sure you’re right about security being involved; the size of it meant either cutting it up there to be carried quickly by a few people or several people carrying it out in one piece much more slowly. The comments on that article led me to read about another sculpture stolen from the east coast, Death of Cleopatra.
In nicer weather I’ll troll my own suburban neighborhood on trash day for metal to scrap; I have the time and a small hybrid SUV to take it to the recycler less than a mile from here. 50/50 for the money and for the environment.
It was a really cool an obelisk made up of interlaced animals in bronze. The marker was for a psychiatrist who I guessed liked animals, his patients left stuffed animals on it as a memorial.
A washer & a dryer are a pair, most folks replace them as a pair. If I found a drier or a washer alone, I will check back for the other one. If homeowner was watching, you bet I will be back!
When we cleaned out my mother’s house (she was sort of a hoarder) we were faced with parceling the stuff out at the curb: that town only collected the ‘special’ stuff once a week, and you weren’t allowed to put out more than one electronic device and more than one appliance at a time. And only residents were allowed to haul things to the dump. We figured we were looking at months, maybe a year to get rid of all that stuff or else hiring one of those ‘Got Junk’ type companies.
But we were tight on finances at that point, so we figured we’d at least start nibbling away at the job with the freebie route. So at 5 pm on collection day we put out a big old tube model television. and a rusty dehumidifier. A half hour later I was hauling some more to-be-trashed stuff to the garage… and both were gone! Hey, we had gotten a week jump on the task, good deal!
We hurried to put out the next television from the pile we had waiting in the garage. (Seriously, there were 9 TVs in the pile, most of which had died long ago) and an ancient water heater.
Those were gone before 7. So we ‘reloaded’ again.
We happened to hear the guy picking up the third batch of stuff and ran out to catch him. The guy looked wary – sort of backing away from our precious trash with his hands raised – but we just asked him, Did he want more? We had lots, he could have all he wanted. We had him back his trailer into the driveway up to our garage and he loaded the thing to overflowing: computers, more TVs, metal chairs, a snowblower that hadn’t run for at least a decade, on and on.
And then we made an “appointment” for him to come back the next day to get the rest of it. 
What amazed me most was that he didn’t have the things from the first two batches, which means at least two scrappers were working the neighborhood over the course of just a few hours.
When I moved out of one of my apartments in a sketchier area (near downtown Racine, for those in the area), I put a lot of that kind of stuff on the curb. Looked like Christmas morning. People were asking me to hold stuff for them. I felt bad saying no, OTOH, it was kind of funny watching people trying to ride down the block on their bike with buckets of old grease from my deep fryer and other generally non-scrapable garbage. But, whatever.
They were probably opening a new Waffle House.
Please forgive my appalling ignorance here, but:
Excluding things like stealing manhole covers or destroying peoples’ property, why is pulling infrastructure from abandoned properties a problem? If you have this factory into which no one has set foot for five decades, and whose owners have long since died/their business has dissolved/whatever, what interest is served by the government prosecuting those who would retrieve valuable materials from it? Obviously the scrappers are putting themselves at risk of injury, but that’s their problem, not mine.
What am I missing?