Scrap steel price? a give a way?

[SND]

What is everyone’s prediction will scrap price ever come back up to where it was 8 or 10 years ago?

I seem to remember the peak being around 2006-2007? before the Beijing Olympics anyway, cause they stopped all the boats and mills around that time to clear the air, and within weeks of that the debt/housing bubble crashed.
It'll take years for demand to go back up, it was already slowing down before the Chinese Flu. Maybe if people finally pull some of their eggs out of being hostage to globalism and a bit more self reliant it'll help(but most won't do that, and USA needs to export its USD's somehow).
Low scrap prices aren't a bad thing so long as you're making $ making the scrap...

Other thing that is almost guaranteed to drive prices of everything up sooner or later is massive inflation. Nobody can create that much currency, then have the banks X10-X20 it through fractional lending and not have it get dumped somewhere. I know raw material isn't going down anyway, expect that to keep going up and real soon.

 

[Ox]

I seem to remember the peak being around 2006-2007? before the Beijing Olympics anyway, cause they stopped all the boats and mills around that time to clear the air, and within weeks of that the debt/housing bubble crashed.
It'll take years for demand to go back up, it was already slowing down before the Chinese Flu. Maybe if people finally pull some of their eggs out of being hostage to globalism and a bit more self reliant it'll help(but most won't do that, and USA needs to export its USD's somehow).
Low scrap prices aren't a bad thing so long as you're making $ making the scrap...

Other thing that is almost guaranteed to drive prices of everything up sooner or later is massive inflation. Nobody can create that much currency, then have the banks X10-X20 it through fractional lending and not have it get dumped somewhere. I know raw material isn't going down anyway, expect that to keep going up and real soon.

The $450/tonne posted above was summer 2008 FWIW.


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Think Snow Eh!
Ox

 

[true temper]

I would be happy to see $250.00 a ton.

 

[Ox]

We had $290 here for Heavy early last year.
I figgered I could make a deal for mine to get me into the $300 mark where I wouldn't feel quite as bad about it, but then the market started diving head first.


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Head First
Ox

 

[Mud]

I just heard steel is at ~$65 a ton here currently. I haven't taken much in myself in a long time, but the idea of just throwing scrap in the trash bugs me. It's usually not too hard to find a half decent guy to haul it off for you whose family will benefit from the small sum of money, and the fact that resources get recycled instead of stuffed in a landfill is a factor for me too.

FWIW, check how your local waste stream works. My county incinerates a lot of it's trash, and the metals are pulled out and hauled to a recycler..

 

[johfoster]

Just pushed into a big hole out here. That would make sense though for the case of incineration.

 

[SND]

The $450/tonne posted above was summer 2008 FWIW.


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Think Snow Eh!
Ox

Ah alright yeah, I just downloaded some decent graphs(steelbenchmarker) and it looks like it peaked around Aug/Oct-08 and the Olympics were August 2008.
China had closed a lot of mills and manufacturing to clear the air and kept ships offshore just before & during the Olympics, so I thought the peak had been ahead of that and not at almost the same time. Interesting. It sure snowballed pretty quick after that.
Now to find where the last 12 years went...

 

[Street]

I really cringe when someone says they chuck it in the trash...all the effort to mine the stuff ship it melt it etc seems such a waste.

If you had clean segregated scrap i would think it would be worth more and if you had the room just stock pile it till prices recover then get a truck to take it direct to foundry.. by the truck load so its worth the time of a scrap collector.

Thats if you don't decide to process it yourself ie melt it into something useful.

Or even get the foundry to make some parts for you when you supply the material cut out the scappy / steel supplier. then you only have casting cost.

Platts has the steel price for iron ore so i would think scrap price would follow the iron ore price.

 

[john.k]

I well remember the $400 a tonne,scrap mania at the time ,everything else was doom and gloom........we scrapped everything in the yard ,and a lot besides ......even stuff in use ,like our workshop bus went in the 40 foot bin ....lots of machine tools ,Outside the scrapyard ,there was a 4 hour wait if went there for an extra $40 a tonne .....talk about treasures ......whole collections of restored tractors ,dozers cranes.....Scrappie fever ,hard to define ,but basically its when a bin is half full ,and you need to fill it for next day pickup.....But it got better than that ......Local foundrys coulnt get raw material ,and were paying up to $800 a ton for small broken castiron and cut up clean steel...Had to be clean,for EPA .....Past 12 years all the foundries have closed and moved to China for cheap labour and EPA crap.

 

[cnctoolcat]

If you happen to make a lot of chips like we do here at the Cathouse (for a 3-man operation anyway...), you're just glad there is a scrap company or two in your region willing to bring you an empty 10- or 20-yard empty chip hopper --- and haul off a full one, every time you ring them on the phone.

I've only got $40-$60/tonne over the last year or two maybe, for small-dense-heavy turnings...

It sucks, but not worse than having a mountain of chips piling up...

ToolCat

 

[Mud]

You're lucky, here they charge to deliver and to pickup the rolloff container, and rent for the container if you have it for any length of time. Made scrapping steel that way a loss even when it was a bit higher.

 

[M.B. Naegle]

At our old shop we were something like an hour drive away from the nearest scrap yard, and those yards were just small time transfer stations, so they didn't give top dollar. We had a couple employees that would have family haul it off for free. The biggest problem we had was that they would occasionally just "assume" they could take our scrap and ended up hauling off a couple pieces that were not junk..

There was one time We had a big load of used machinery come in, half of it was junk, so we talked to the city and they loaned us a roll-off and hauled it away for free. I think in the end after we figured gas and rental fees, we might have made a couple hundred dollars on that load.

 

[Mud]

The biggest problem we had was that they would occasionally just "assume" they could take our scrap and ended up hauling off a couple pieces that were not junk..

That seems to be true of any scrapper. I learned to hide anything liftable indoors if I didn't want it taken when I had a scrapper come by for free scrap, no matter how far from the pile it was.

 

[M.B. Naegle]

That seems to be true of any scrapper. I learned to hide anything liftable indoors if I didn't want it taken when I had a scrapper come by for free scrap, no matter how far from the pile it was.

Dumbest one was we had a couple of pallet jacks getting kits put into them. One ended up on the scrap truck while I was out of the shop. When I asked about It he got the 'oops, I F'd up," look and he said He thought we couldn't get parts for it. That and many other issues make me wish we could have let him go, but the employment pool in that area was so terrible, we lived with it.

 

[pavt]

Here ia a list of what our recycler is paying in PA.

Retail + price is >100 lbs. unless otherwise noted.

I was gonna ask you while I was there but I forgot to. And my hearing wasn't cooperating that day (sux) LOL I could barely understand anything.....

But here in NY the scrap yards won't sell to you, they aren't allowed to. Are you allowed to buy from scrappers in PA?

Up here all the little guys and hobbyists are screaming bloody murder at the prices because they are forced to go to the big suppliers like ALRO and very often the big companies just won't deal with less than a ton.

I always keep an eye out for old 3/4 ton truck axles because they all switched to 4140PH about 20 yrs ago.

Some posters here could make decent money on their offcuts and scrap if they organize it and advertise it on some place like HSM. Guaranteed you'd get better money that way for the offcuts.

 

[Mud]

Are you allowed to buy from scrappers in PA?

No restrictions that I know of. Typical prices for steel are .35 to .60.

 

[Ox]

Who "doesn't allow them to sell"?

Company policy?

State?

I have a hard time believing that the state is regulating who the scrap yards can sell to.


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Think Snow Eh!
Ox

 

[pavt]

Who "doesn't allow them to sell"?

Company policy?

State?

I have a hard time believing that the state is regulating who the scrap yards can sell to.


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Think Snow Eh!
Ox

This is NY -- nothing surprises me anymore.
Frankly I dunno who it is. There are two or three *very* large scrap operations in my area (Buffalo) and none of them sell. It all goes on the slow boat to some other country. I mean industrial scrap, not auto dismantling.

 

[pavt]

No restrictions that I know of. Typical prices for steel are .35 to .60.

Thanks -- can anyone recommend some decent scrappers between Buffalo and Erie? I can make a day trip out of that.

 

[Rob L]

I really cringe when someone says they chuck it in the trash...all the effort to mine the stuff ship it melt it etc seems such a waste.

Ditto, seems such a waste and if it's so much more efficient to reprocess scrap alu than mine fresh (as my material supplier states) then why are some people dumping it and then other people still mining it?

Is it typical in the US to have to pay to get your scrap metal collected?

My local scrap dealer will come and collect FOC and last year I got £0.50 a kg for alu, cheaper than just sticking it in the trash. I need to get my swarf bins emptied again very soon so I'll be interested to see what I get this time, but honestly as long as they collect it FOC and it goes into the recycling stream and eventually turned back into new material I don't mind if I don't get anything for it, it'd save me having to invoice them for it at least.