What would be a more efficient way to recycle a ton of random screws?
- Pay people minimum wage to sort them.
- Melt them and recast them.
Are they all made of the same material?
Good question. I’d like to hear an answer to both.
Being made of different materials shouldn’t be too big a deal, since it’s pretty easy to sort loose metal electromagnetically. Even non-magnetic metals like aluminum and copper can be sorted based on their conductivity, using induced magnetism.
Yeah, but…
If you are talking about quality fastners (not the stuff Home Depot sells), the grade of steel is important, and you arn’t going to be able to mechanically separate different steels.
I think the only viable way to recycle screws would be as scrap metal. There are just too many variables in their manufacture to effectively sort them for reuse.
There are probably issues of scale here. I’m sure I’ve gotten much more use value out of my coffee can full of miscellaneous leftover screws I keep in my garage than the couple of cents I’d get for scrap.
hey! there you go. Get a big bunch of coffee cans, fill them with assorted screws, and have a yard sale.
…or baby food jars.
If you are really “recycling” screws you would have a problem as the process of screwing them in and unscrewing them in may have induced weaknesses.
You can’t trust you have what is required or that they were not damaged.
We scrap tons of them each month. No manufacturer would want to use fasteners that have no testing, guarantees of materials, finish specs… and for casual home use, you would need to have each screw sorted by size, thread type, material, etc.
In fact, these days, your average screw sold to a manufacturer has prints, specs, country of origin and ROHS compliancy certification. And THEN they go through quality checks.
Too many unstated parameters. Are these unused, mixed up screws or screws that have already been used and need to be graded as to condition as well as size and kind?
I guess you can do some math. Five pounds of drywall screws goes for about $20.00. Minimum wage is roughly 8 dollars? So, assuming your Big Pile of Screws doesn’t cost anything originally and that packaging and selling doesn’t cost anything, then your lackeys would need to sort five pounds of screws in 2 1/2 hours just to be competitive. Depending on the size of the screw, that’s 1000 screws at 200/pound (for 1 5/8 drywall screws, if you’re interested). So, 400 screws/hour or a bit over 6/minute.
One decision every 10 seconds isn’t impossible if you have a fairly limited number of screws, although it would be insanely mind numbing after a while. So, within the rather generous parameters I’ve used, it’s actually almost cost effective to hire minimum wagers to sort out your screws. I wouldn’t have guessed this, given that screws are a mass-produced commodity. However, the markup on screws is probably respectable, meaning that your sorting process would become prohibitively expensive.
Additionally, if you have any sort of spoilage in the screws, so that there’s a high percentage of discards (stripped threads or heads, rust, etc…), then you start losing. I’m pretty sure that settling up with OSHA after your serfs contract tetanus from reaching into big tubs of pointy objects will put you firmly in the red. So if you’re going to go this route, you might as well go full bore and hire starving Third Worlders in places where health and benefit plans don’t exist to do your sorting.
Decades ago, when I used to buy much from catalogs, I bought a “Hell Box” for a few dollars. It was a gray plastic box filled with a couple of pounds of new unsorted nuts, bolts, screws, studs, and washers of various sizes and metals. They looked like they might have come from small appliance/electronics manufacturer since nothing was larger than 1/4 inch. That box has saved me many a trip to the hardware store over the years when I found just the fastener I needed.
After reading Finagle’s analysis, I’d be tempted to say, “Screw it” to the idea of recycling fasteners.
Add in the time to inspect each screw for straightness, stripped heads, locating the correct pile to place the inspected screw and I’d have to go with the assessment that it’s not worth it at minimum wage to sort them.
Melting and recasting - assuming using a magnet to quick sort the brass from the steel - Your output steel cannot be assumed to be higher quality than the worst screw going in. I’m guessing you’re not springing for a metallurgist to correct the steel quality during the process.
Ditto on the brass.
Brand new but commingled screws (and nuts, bolts, washers etc) at the plant where they’re made get scrapped and ultimately re-melted. This in a very competitive industry, leading me to believe it’s the most cost-effective way to go.