I recently gave a bunch of stuff to a guy that was collecting for scrap metal. I know this stuff was worth good money, but frankly I just wanted this trash out of my house. The fact that he and two workers were willing to pick it up, tells me that this is worth plenty of money. I don’t care, I just wanted to get rid of that shit.
I gave this guy an oven, a trash compactor, an old pellet stove (very heavy with a huge amount of steal), and a bunch of scrap the previous owner had left me.
I really don’t give a shit how much this stuff was worth, but something this guy said at the end of the deal hit my bullshit meter like mad. He claimed all this stuff he picked up would get about 15 bucks. Wow, this guy guy I’ve never met was doing me such a favor!
I don’t buy this crap at all. The load I gave them had to be worth a couple of hundred dollars. They were going to pick up my stuff when all they thought I had was a trash compactor, and I really don’t believe that these guys are the Mother Teresa’s of old trash.
iron can be a fraction of a cent to a few cents per pound.
appliances have to be dismantled and separated and compacted (made as small as can) to recycle. each metal type has to be separated from others and nonmetallic materials removed.
if it could be resold as good used items that would be its maximum value.
for scrap value the scrap or the stove smashed to flat chunks were probably the most value considering the additional work needed to get the best scrap value.
I took a 4 by 8 by 3 foot trailer full of aluminum cans to the recycler once. Got like 30 dollars. Thats pure cans they dont have to dick with nearly as much as other scrap metal.
We took in some large (arounf 20 hp) motors, pumps and other scrap in last month, I think it was about 1700 pounds. got around $78 for it. Scrap is not worth much now.
There are good markets for secondhand appliance parts. A client of mine worked with appliances and would do free delivery and free haul-away of the old appliances. The appliances they hauled away mostly became their inventory of parts used for service calls. If they didn’t want the parts, they had a few options: fix and resell the appliance, sell the parts to other dealers or recycle the metal.
Interesting. So the guy wasn’t feeding me a line. I still suspect that he plans to strip those things for parts. I have a hard time believing that he and his buddies took my stuff out of the goodness of their hearts. I don’t care at all. For all I know, the oven works, but the probability was very low that I would ever use it for anything. The mouse shit made it very unappealing for food. I know that that pellet stove was mostly functional, but the auger burned out and I couldn’t get anyone to work on it.
He wasn’t doing out of the goodness of his heart. How long did it take them to load the stuff? That, the time they spent at the scrap yard (or dismantling the items, inventorying the parts and selling them) per hour, and dividing that by three is how much they made per hour . It’s probably sub-minimum wage.
It is a low risk way to make a little money. Basically, if you’re poor, a lot of work for a little money is better then no money.
At one point, I collected scrap.Brought home $50.00 a day. It was better then nothing though.
My brother is a plumber and also does heating and air conditioning systems, and he has a “junk man” that he’s been using for years. Mel is the type of person usually described as a “tough old bird” - plug of chewing tobacco in his mouth, hands with a grip that can crack walnuts and knows more about leverage than anyone since Archimedes. He’s been dealing with junk and scrap for years and lives in a reasonably well-kept home in a neighborhood few would want to move to, with a yard filled with appliances in various stages of being broken down for metal.
Part of the deal with finding and keeping a good junk man is to make sure you call them when you have the good stuff, and they’ll be willing to come and pick up the less good stuff. “Good stuff” in this case is items with the highest/easiest to extract valuable metal content. Broken air conditioning exterior units are at the top of that list - copper prices went through the roof a few years back, although there is a huge amount of work involved in removing the aluminum cooling vanes from the copper coils. Copper and brass plumbing scrap - bits of pipe, Ts, elbows, valves - were right up there too. A broken stove doesn’t have anywhere near the same amount of value, although a gas stove will have enough stainless steel to make it worthwhile to get at it.
But ultimately it’s like any other customer service business. Come get this worthless junk so you’ll get the more valuable junk later.
Of late I’ve been a position to acquire some scrap metal - mostly empty cans, but also some leftovers from construction job sites (which I assure everyone were legally obtained from the owner). My most recent receipt from the junkers I could locate had the following prices:
aluminum cans: $0.33/pound
**scrap iron: $100/ton **(which is higher than it was a few months ago when it was $77/ton)
**Junk car (must have title to prove legal ownership): **$130/ton
Sorry I don’t have a figure for scrap aluminum or copper, didn’t have anything like that on that occasion. Scrap aluminum, though, is less than aluminum cans. Copper is worth more than aluminum, but I never get any of that.
So you do the math. How heavy was the stove? Unless it weighs a couple tons it’s not worth “hundreds of dollars”. Now, the guys in question might have bothered to pull of copper from the appliances (copper is worth more money right now) or aluminum if they could identify it. By separating those items they’ll get a better price per unit weight.
We have some guys in my area who drive pickups around picking up junk on trash collection days, or who inquire at work sites. With a little hustling you could make some money, but not a hell of a lot.
Of course, there are also criminals who bust into houses to steal the copper plumbing, wiring, or gutters or strip the aluminum siding off a house - that is illegal. If you show up at my local junkers with a house worth of siding or a truck full of water pipes you might have some 'splaining to do! (That’s why I don’t have copper - what I’d have access to is household plumbing parts, and the boss takes those because with a general contractor’s license and materials receipts it makes sense he’d have scrap and he can prove it’s legally obtained. Me… I might have a difficult time explaining where I got 50 pounds of copper of that sort)
I usually wait until I have a load that fills up at least half the bed of my pickup, and then go to the junkers while I have other errands in that area. Usually gets me enough to put gas in the truck and have some leftover for a small lunch. But I ain’t getting rich and if I tried to make a living off it I’d probably starve.