Scrap copper grades and how pricing works

The grades

Yards sort copper into a handful of buckets. The names are close to universal in the United States, though a given yard may split them further.

• Bare bright. Clean, uncoated wire, heavier than 16 gauge, no paint, no solder, no oxidation. This is the top of the market. It is what you get from stripping fresh building wire.
• No. 1 copper. Clean tube, bus bar, and heavier wire. Some age and darkening is fine. No solder, no fittings, no insulation.
• No. 2 copper. Copper that is soldered, painted, or noticeably oxidised. Old plumbing usually lands here because of the solder joints.
• Light copper. Thin sheet, gutters, kettles. Sometimes called No. 3.

The difference between bare bright and No. 2 is not small. On a large cable pull it is the difference between a job worth doing in house and one worth handing to somebody else.

Insulated wire is its own problem

Insulated wire is not priced as copper. It is priced on how much copper is inside it, which depends on the gauge and the thickness of the jacket. A yard will either quote a recovery percentage or run a sample through a granulator to find out.

Thick cable with a thin jacket can run past 60 per cent recovery. Thin communication wire in a heavy jacket can come in under 20. Both look like a spool of wire on the dock, and they are worth very different money.

This is why nobody serious quotes insulated wire sight unseen.

How the price is actually set

Copper trades on the COMEX exchange and the spot price moves daily. A scrap yard does not pay spot. It pays a percentage of spot, and the gap covers freight, sorting, processing, and the yard's margin.

Two things follow from that. Your price changes week to week even with an identical load, so a quote from three months ago tells you very little. And the cleaner the material, the closer to spot you get paid, because less of the work is left for the yard.

If a buyer refuses to explain how they arrived at a number, that is worth noticing.

What preparation is worth

Stripping wire pays. Sorting grades apart pays. Whether it pays enough depends on your labour cost and the volume you are sitting on.

Rough guide from practice: if you have a few hundred pounds of heavy cable and someone with spare hours, stripping it is usually worth the time. If you have twenty pounds, it is not. If you have ten tons, you want a recycler with a granulator rather than anyone with a knife.

Mixing grades together is the expensive mistake. A load of clean No. 1 with No. 2 thrown in on top gets graded down to the worst thing the buyer finds in it. Keeping two barrels apart on the shop floor is close to free and protects the whole load.