[Closed] What happens to scrap metal ?

Scraps a bigger, more sophisticated business than it used to be - the Rag and Bone men haven't gone, they just drive BMWs now instead of a horse and cart and operate multimillion pound recycling facilities. Ultimately the metal goes to wherever metal things get made - China was the main destination but production there is slowing down so we can expect the scrap piles here to start getting taller again.

Some metal is more sought after than others Steel is easy to recycle but also pretty cheap to manufacture from scratch if you don't so even when demand is high from manufacturing the scrap price is never astronomical. Copper however... once everyone in china has as much copper in their houses that we have in ours... that'll be it, all the economically recoverable copper will be gone. Last time I had to scrap some copper it was worth £5000/ton, compared to steel which probably peaked around £120 and probably worth less than that now

There are two ways in which its cost effective - one is that theres a market for it so long as somewhere someone is making roughly as much new stuff as we're throwing away, the other is theres a tax on landfill so theres an economic drive to find ways of stopping any material just being chucked in a hole in the ground, stuff gets recycled not so much to make money as to save spending it

This hole near me is the hole the tenements of Glasgow were quarried out of

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Its all fields now but under those fields it looks like this

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Click on the [url= ]original[/url] and zoom in - theres barely a single thing in there that wouldn't have a value recycled now - all those pallets and furniture would be going in free skips to the Egger chipboard factory up the road, the metal would be worth roughly the same in scrap as it would cost to dump them in landfill tax - so effectively worth double their scrap value.

It's only a matter of time I suspect before we will be "mining" old refuse dumps.

As you point out, alot of embedded value has been thrown away into big holes in the past.

As you point out, alot of embedded value has been thrown away into big holes in the past.

in that hole above you've got both the metal and the fuel for the furnace!

According to Sapa, 75% of the aluminium EVER produced is still in use, and it only takes 5% of the original energy input (mining, refining etc) to re-melt it into something new. So I guess at some point we will start mining the "missing" 25% from landfill...

Plenty of sites in the UK where it gets re-melted and cast / extruded / rolled into something else.

A couple of iron foundries near to me use a healthy amount of scrap.

It's only a matter of time I suspect before we will be "mining" old refuse dumps.

The issue is "what else" went in there.

Yes there's old car chassis which can pretty much be chucked into the blast furnace whole.

But tyres, plastics etc, they need to be recovered and incinerated properly. And batteries full of mercury, cadmium, lead, lithium etc. Who hand on heart has never thrown dud AA's in the bin? They're a nightmare to separate and dispose of. And organic material will be decomposing releasing loads of methane which you would have to deal with in any mine, both from an environmental perspective it can't just be released, and it's flammability/explosive nature.

We compress our aluminium swarf and get £900/tonnne for it recycled. As 95% of some of our billets end up as swarf it's a worthwhile exercise.

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(Amazed it took this long.....)

I take a bit of stuff down to the local recyclers and the procedure has been tightened up considerably in recent years. You can't just turn up with stuff and get cash; you have to be an accredited customer and present a small bar-coded card, which is scanned before you tip. The money is paid to your bank account.

And yes, even plumber's scrap copper gets spectacular prices. I never take any metal to the tip now, I save it up out of sight of the road then take it for weighing in. Quite enjoy doing it actually.

the Rag and Bone men haven't gone, they just drive BMWs now instead of a horse and cart

In Germany they still exist with the horse and cart. Went for a ride at the end of summer with a mate and we almost stacked it into the back of the cart coming down a road and round a corner.

And organic material will be decomposing releasing loads of methane which you would have to deal with in any mine, both from an environmental perspective it can't just be released, and it's flammability/explosive nature.

I believe that there are some companies setting up small generators on old landfill and mining the methane to power them.

I was expecting the Five to be at least in second place in the posting order if not in the original post itself!

FF to 30mins in to see them have to repair it in situ...

There was a landfill site outside Dublin being recycled, everything plastic/aggregate/metal etc. There was a sizable washing/separating plant on the site to sort it all. The 'operatives' onsite were watched closely as there was quite a bit of coinage being found/recycled too!

Land fill sites making power here - http://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-how-the-uk-generates-its-electricity

clean steel plate and girder was 65 quid in december

a car was 35 quid.

arse fell right out that market - almost in line with the oil price and the chinese economy.

some of the cheap "recycled" steel coming back from china has been shocking though

some of the cheap "recycled" steel coming back from china has been shocking though

Yep, I took a load of steel and cast iron and bits to the local scrappie last week and didn't get anything for it. £12 for some bits of copper.

They reckoned there is 400,000 tons of scrap metal sitting in Tyne Dock because nobody wants it. They (our local scrappie) used to pay £100 for a scrap car and sell them for £180 but now he has piles of them sitting about. Blamed China too.

Blamed China too.

yeah, bloody China, staying over there, not buying our scrap and not using it to make anything that no-one wants to buy 🙂

Most if not all landfill closed in the last few years will of been sealed and capped and will now be producing methane which runs engines that feed into the national grid. The leachate that comes out of them has changed markedly, with the loss of a lot of organic matter going in the leachate is a lot nastier, also the methane coming off isn't as "good" Sealing a cell is an incredible thing to see, some serious engineering goes into it.

A big scrappy I used to regulate near Banbury shifted about 100,000 tons at the top of the market about 7 years ago, made an absolute killing.

They are all a dodgy as is most of the waste industry, it is just a matter of how dodgy.

A lot of it is now sitting very close to edge of our large rivers overloading the river walls.

Scrap metal dealers will sit on it until the value makes it worth shipping and then load it in a big hurry. Currently, it's not worth the cost of shipping and is a liability not an asset. Won't be long before it becomes a problem the landowners will have to deal with when the dealers declare bankruptcy. It's a notoriously fickle industry.

All the Environment Agency's sheet piles come from a facility in Europe and are made from recycled steel.

I'm paying around £450 to £550 a ton for new steel from the stockholders.
As the structures I supply are temporary , I have to factor in the scrap price into the overall price. Currently around £40 a ton shown this way so anything that can be re-used with a few alterations is stored in a field . Win win sometimes as you end up selling back to the client who paid for it last time 😆

They are all a dodgy as is most of the waste industry, it is just a matter of how dodgy.

Indeed - although there has supposed to have been some tightening up... scrapyards are supposed to see id and pay into your bank account (rather than cash and no questions) its all still pretty lax - some of the bigger yards are going through the motions but the small one near me is still cash and no ID asked for.

The problem is Scrapyards make their money from selling metal, not buying it, but they can't sell metal that they've not got - so if theres a way to turn a blind eye to where stuff is coming from they'll find a way of turning it.

On the lead front, there's these guys:

http://ecobatgroup.com/ecobatgroup-en/

More than 80 per cent of our lead production is pure lead, which involves the manufacture of refined lead from scrap lead sources. We maximise the value derived from our lead recycling operations by converting what would have been waste into other products that we sell or recycle. These include sulphuric acid, polypropylene, sodium sulphate, zinc, aluminium, industrial minerals, plastics and polyfoams.

"scrap lead" in this case is almost all dead automotive batteries, hence the other recycling streams.

I did my apprenticeship at a large steelworks we had a huge modern blast furnace , 4 large electric arc furnaces and inspection departments, we ran on iron ore for the blast furnace and scrap metal for electric arc and and also had a brass steel and aluminium foundry.

Then due to cheap imports, all closed down and demolished,2500 jobs lost , me included, the new plant was sold to china and transported to Chan King and rebuilt, and now supplies uk plc with cheap steel made with little regard to the safety or environment ofits workers.

And today 1100 redundancies have been announced at steelworks in wales.

Now living on the wirral , we face one of the largest steel exporting scrap yards in the uk, all scrap exported to foreign countries to melted down and reimported into new steel stock,

The family who owns the largest scrap company in the uk were in the top 25 richest or something daft the last time I looked.

I did some work for a big scrap yard / recycling company. They were putting their shredded steel into a container to send to India.

I have a jam jar full of mercury, what's it worth?