Scrap metal prices?

[David]

With memories of getting nearly £400 from all the stuff we stripped out of the house during the refurb, which would be mainly copper and brass plus some old PVC coated wiring, I had a quick look at scrap metal prices.

PVC coated copper wire at not very much per kilo, not a lot for lead or iron/steel.

Did I have more scrap than I fully recollect or has the price bombed in the last couple of years?

Looks not worth driving to a scrappy for perhaps £20 or less before the cost of fuel.

Just take it down the local tip?

Oh, and I haven't noticed any Eastern Europeans casing the estate for scrap metal from refurbishment work in the last year or so.

Cheers

Dave R

[harry]

Don't you read the papers? Do you not know what commodities are?

ices-are-falling

[Theo]

Theo

[Jethro_uk]

We used to have at least 3 scrappies *daily* for ages.

Haven't seen one for ages now ...

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Don't know about all, but a few years ago you'd get about 250 quid for a largish scrap car and free collection. Now you have to pay to get it removed.

[Brian Gaff]

I think that cash in hand has more or less died out since you needed a licence to trade in it. I imagine now its the big players or the dodgy geezers who are making the money, if is any, as China are now dumping their excess output of new metal on the markets. this is why the uk steel industry is struggling. Brian

[newshound]

having a good old UKIP / Brexit type moan about the state of the world, through to the rubbish quality of Chinese steel. They are charging to take vehicles now but I didn't ask how much.

[Martin Bonner]

So the price of "high grade copper" has roughly halved. That probably means that price of scrap copper is going to have fallen much more (the price the processor gets for the clean copper has halved, but it still costs him as much to remove the PVC sheathing etc so the price he can afford to pay you has collapsed.)

[GB]

The collapse in price has the plus point that scrotes aren't digging up the telephone cables any more. Despite having three separate lines to our house from multiple suppliers, all three went down for 10 days when some buggers made off with the cable.

It's too bloody easy. Open a manhole and cut the cable. Open a different manhole 300m up the road, and cut the cable again. Attach it to the back of your van and drive off 300m. At one time, that netted the thieves around £3k worth of scrap, assuming no nasty questions asked by the dealer. (As we all know, scrap dealers are known for their honesty, but there must be the occasional bad apple.) I guess that now that might net £300, rather than £3k, which is hardly worth bothering with.

The cost to BT and people like me must have been 10 or 100 times what the thieves received.

[Kevin]

All the gory detail at

"Light iron" (the sort of stuff that manifests itself in odd corners of your garage) has recovered very slightly from its worst trough, but it's still around a quarter of the price it was 18 months ago.

The other thing that's hit scrappies is the money they've had to spend on decontamination bays for scrap cars - they're even supposed to drain the washer bottle into separate containers for proper disposal. And as for airbags and seatbelt pretensioners...

My favourite local place, Wards at Ilkeston, pay for cars by weight then knock something off if it's still got tyres on.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Those regulations came in many many years ago.

[Andrew]

raw copper price is still above the 2009 low point and a fair way above the 2003 low point.

[harry]

Cash in hand is now illegal.