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They don't do just one and clean Cu tubing is over $2.50/lb even in under 50 lb walkin and it's been much higher than that.
The "pros" take the units somewhere and strip them then sell; sophisticated bunches they've busted around here have crushers/sorters, the whole shootin' match just like the big chop shops have everything they need for dismantling cars/trucks for the black market parts market or to disguise/retitle/etc. the vehicle on the "steal on commission" basis.
It's a major problem; having rural electric co-op that traverses much open country that is very sparsely populated, we've lost miles of the ground wires from poles and as others have noted even some places they have actually tied on and pulled the lines themselves.
There's been a bunch in Wichita that have targetted a couple of the park ballfields during offseason--they've done 10X the damage to light standards, switching gear, etc., that the cost of the materials has been. The real pisser is a couple of them were all-volunteer contributed neighborhood fields.
New more restrictive laws on the recyclers on what they have to have for ID and materials they can take have helped a little; enforcement on the crooked ones of them is a problem in lack of resources altho it's fairly easy to tell which are the most problematical there's still the effort to actually make sufficient of a case to prosecute at a serious enough level to do real damage instead of just nuisance level...