Getting The Most From Your Scrap Takes A Little Work But It Can Be Worth It.
Welcome to 2013! We hope you enjoyed the Holiday Season.
Our conveniently located Mississauga and Oakville locations make dropping off your scrap metal quick and easy. See our home page for addresses.
Perhaps as one of your new year’s resolutions, you have decided to clean up and recycle some of the odds and ends around the house or business. You can put your junk in your trunk and just head off to one of our locations in either Mississauga or Oakville. Or, you can consider what could be done to add value to your scrap metal and ensure that the trip is as worthwhile as possible.
Some Things To Keep In Mind First of all…bringing your scrap metal to Peel Scrap Metal means that you will be dealing with a scrap metal recycler where the buyers are knowledgeable and can grade your material properly. Our scales are certified legal for trade, so the weights will always be accurate, and the pricing always current. And because we are community-based in the GTA, if you ask, you may well learn that among family, neighbors, work colleagues, and friends, there are folks who are already Peel Scrap Metal customers and can attest to the positive experience they had with us. Sorting & Cleaning Your Metal In Advance Secondly. scrap metal prices
if your scrap metal is properly prepared, sorted, and assembled in a way that is easy to handle, you will get through the process more quickly and maximize the value of your material. The issue with preparing and sorting the material you bring into Peel Scrap costs. Your cost or our cost. So you need to decide what your time is worth. From our point of view, if the material needs to be graded, sorted, and processed it will be purchased at a lower rate to take into account the costs involved in doing that additional work. So compare the value of the material when the work is done to the value of the material when no work is done and see if the difference is worth your time.
For example, we are often asked whether it pays to strip insulated wire and sell the bare copper or whether it is worth it to remove the copper from motors and transformers and sell it separately. You just have to do the math. Using round numbers for pricing as an illustration, suppose you have 100 lbs of insulated wire that is 70% brite copper (the other 30% is the insulation or plastic which we don’t buy). If you sell it as is it would be worth 100 lbs x $2.00 per pound = $200.00.
If you stripped the 100 lbs, you would get 70 lbs of brite copper (70% of 100 lbs) at $3.20 per pound = $224.00. The difference is $24.00. If it took you an hour to do this, you earned $24.00 an hour. Is that worth your time and effort?
The price chart on our home page always reflects the most up-to-date pricing for the most popular metals we recycle.
Lots Of Information On Our Site Our website can be helpful in sorting some of this out as it provides current price indications and descriptions of the more common types of metal that we purchase. In general, whatever the type and grade of metal you have to sell, its value will be maximized by removing any off-spec material. Rant–Let’s Make One Thing Perfectly Clear About Scrap Metal In our business, which is recycling, one of the most misused descriptions of the material we handle is ‘waste’.
SCRAP METAL IS NOT WASTE! Metals are commodities that are bought and sold. They are essential to the production of goods and the delivery of the services that we enjoy on this planet. They are part of everything from the cans that package our food and beverages to the construction of our homes and offices, the airplanes, cars, and other transport we use for travel, the entertainment we enjoy, the appliances and computers we rely on, the equipment we use for our agriculture and so on and so on.
The fact that metals can be used over and over again without the loss of their physical properties is a bonus we should celebrate. Not only because it is a sustainable solution to the problem of finite resources in a world of increasing demand…but also because it is significantly less costly to use recycled metal and this is reflected in the prices we pay for our goods and services. Unfortunately, many private and public institutions still don’t get it, despite all the talk about recycling, green living, and landfill diversion.
Business models need to move forward to accommodate the benefits of the new recycling realities as metals, and almost everything else that is produced these days can now be re-used in some form whether they are turned into new products, turned into energy or refurbished for re-use. If you have any comments on this blog or questions about recycling we would be happy to hear from you.