Get the Most of Scrap Metal Recycling With These Tips

14 March 2016
 Categories: Industrial & Manufacturing, Blog

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You can earn some extra cash from recycling scrap metal. However, if you've never done it before, you need to understand a few things to enable you get the full advantage of your scrap metal. This means that you need to avoid some mistakes that could get in the way of your scrap metal recycling. For this reason, find out some of the best practices when recycling scrap metal.

Call Ahead

Calling ahead should be among the first things you do when planning to take your scrap metal to a recycler or yard. Different scrap metal yards deal with different types of metal. For this reason, calling ahead will enable you to know whether the type of metal that you have will be accepted. In addition, you want to make sure that the scrap metal yard will be open so that you don't waste your time and money taking your scrap metal to the yard, only to find it closed.

Prepare Your Metals Properly

Preparation of your metals is very important because it eliminates the need for the scrap metal yard or company to do the preparation itself. This means that the company will save on the time as well as labour costs, which in turn translates to better buying prices for your metals. For this reason, remove the insulation on copper wires and other wiring. In addition, pull off any plastic mouldings from large pieces of scrap metal from appliances or a part of your car.

Sort/ Separate Your Metals

It's important to sort out your metals because different types of grades of metal will have different prices as well. For this reason, using a magnet, sort out the magnetic and non-magnetic metals. When separating the metals, remember to label them as well for easy identification even when delivering them at the scrap metal yard.

Proper Timing

The timing is also a critical factor and you therefore need to consider it. First, you wouldn't want to take your scrap metal at a time when so many people are taking theirs too because the availability of the metals can affect the prices as well. However, even if the difference in price is insignificant, you may want to avoid the hassle and commotion or traffic of so many people at the yard. For this reason, try delivering metal during the midweek when there are high chances of not finding as many people as the rest of the busy days of the week such as Mondays. In addition, remember scraping can be more beneficial when there's demand for the metal. Therefore, warmers months would be ideal when the construction activities are increasing.