Scrap Metal Value Calculator

Introduction: what a mixed scrap load is actually worth

A scrap load is never priced as "metal". It is priced grade by grade. The buyer at the counter looks at your material, decides which published specification each container matches, weighs it, and multiplies. Two loads with identical weights can differ by hundreds of dollars purely because one was sorted into clean grades and the other went into a single mixed bin. This scrap metal value calculator makes that difference visible: you give it a weight and a price for each stream you actually have, and it returns the payout that arithmetic implies, before and after the deduction the yard takes for moisture, dirt and attachments.

The five streams on the form - copper, brass, aluminum, stainless steel and ferrous steel - cover almost everything a household or small shop brings in. Each one has an internal ladder of grades. Copper alone runs from bare bright wire at the top, through No. 1 and No. 2 copper, down to insulated wire that has to be stripped before it is worth anything near the headline price. The gap between the top and the bottom of that single ladder is usually larger than the gap between aluminum and brass, which is why grade discipline earns more money than hauling extra weight.

Use the calculator before you load the vehicle, not after. A fifteen minute sort in the driveway - pulling steel brackets off aluminum frames, cutting the ends off insulated cable, keeping galvanized duct away from the aluminum sheet pile - is often worth more per hour than the trip itself. The Sort Yard game further down the page drills exactly that habit under time pressure, using the same prices the calculator uses.

This calculator and the Sort Yard game are learning estimates built from illustrative prices. They are not a price quote, an offer, or professional advice. Confirm every figure with your own buyer.

Formula for scrap payout after yard deductions

The core of the calculation is a weighted sum. For each metal stream , take the weight and multiply it by the price per pound that your buyer quotes for the exact grade you are bringing in. Because scale tickets are not always written in pounds, the calculator first converts whatever unit you select into pounds using a factor : one kilogram is 2.2046226 pounds, one short ton is 2,000 pounds, and one metric tonne is 2,204.6226 pounds.

Formula: V_gross = ∑ i(w_i ⋅ k) ⋅ p_i

Almost no load is paid at gross value. Buyers subtract a deduction , expressed as a percentage, for water, dirt, plastic, rubber and ferrous fasteners that ride in with the metal. The net payout is therefore:

Formula: V_net = V_gross ⋅ (1 − d / 100)

The blended price the calculator reports is simply the gross value divided by the total converted weight, which tells you what the whole load averaged per pound:

Formula: p ¯ = V_gross / (∑ i w_i k)

There is one more rule that the arithmetic above hides, and it is the rule the game teaches. A container is not paid at the average grade of its contents. It is paid at the grade of its worst content. If a bin holds pieces whose individual grade indices are , where a larger index means a lower grade, then the whole bin prices at:

Formula: V_bin = (∑ i w_i) ⋅ p (max i g_i)

That maximum is why a single insulated offcut in a bare bright bin is expensive. Twelve pounds of bare bright at $3.85 is $46.20. The same twelve pounds re-graded as insulated wire at $1.10 is $13.20. One piece, thirty-three dollars.

Grade ladders and example prices by metal stream

Scrap prices are local quotes that move with the exchange price of the underlying metal, so treat the table below as a shape rather than a promise. What is stable is the ordering: within every stream the clean, single-alloy, attachment-free grade sits well above the dirty one, and the penalty for slipping a rung is far bigger on copper than on steel. The right-hand column lists the specific defect that knocks each grade down to the next one.

Source and version note: the prices above are illustrative yard-level figures for well prepared material, chosen so the ratios between grades are realistic; they are not quotes and they will not match your buyer's board on any given day. The grade names follow the trade language codified in the ReMA (formerly ISRI) Scrap Specifications Circular. Densities are nominal values for the pure metal or the common alloy family.

Density is the other half of the intuition. Copper is more than three times denser than aluminum, so a bundle of wire that fits in one hand can outweigh an armful of siding. That works both ways: a big-looking aluminum load is light and therefore cheap, while a small stainless sink is heavy and pays more than it looks. Judging a pile by eye is how sellers end up disappointed at the scale, and it is why a legal-for-trade scale is the only number that settles the question.

Worked example: a garage cleanout priced grade by grade

Suppose a cleanout yields 12 lb of No. 1 copper tube, 6 lb of clean yellow brass, 24 lb of aluminum extrusion, 18 lb of 304 stainless, and 140 lb of prepared steel - two hundred pounds in total. Using the example prices above and a 5 percent yard deduction for the dirt and the few screws left in the extrusion, the calculation runs like this:

Formula: V_gross = 12 × 3.55 + 6 × 2.30 + 24 × 0.86 + 18 × 0.58 + 140 × 0.13 = 105.68

Applying the deduction gives the number you would actually be handed:

Formula: V_net = 105.68 × (1 − 0.05) = 100.40

The blended price is $105.68 divided by 200 lb, or about $0.53 per pound gross. Notice how the numbers sit: 140 lb of steel - seventy percent of the load by weight - contributes $18.20, while 12 lb of copper contributes $42.60. Six percent of the weight carried forty percent of the value. That ratio is the single most useful thing to internalise about scrap, because it tells you where the sorting effort belongs. Spend the time on the copper and the brass; throw the steel in whole.

Now run the counterfactual the game is built around. Leave one short length of insulated cable in the copper container and the buyer regrades all 12 lb as insulated wire at $1.10. Gross falls from $105.68 to $76.28, a 28 percent cut to the whole ticket, caused by a piece that weighed a few ounces.

How to use this scrap metal value calculator

1. Sort first, then weigh. Put each grade in its own container and weigh each container separately on a bathroom, platform or shipping scale. A mixed container has to be entered at the price of its worst content, not its average.
2. Pick the unit that matches your scale ticket - pounds, kilograms, short tons or metric tonnes. The calculator converts everything to pounds before pricing, because per-pound prices are the North American convention.
3. Call your buyer or read the posted board and enter the price for the exact grade you have. If you are unsure whether your copper is No. 1 or No. 2, enter the lower price; an estimate that disappoints you at the counter is worse than one that surprises you.
4. Enter a realistic yard deduction. Zero is right for dry, prepared, attachment-free material. Five to ten percent is common for ordinary household scrap. Wet, dirty or heavily attached loads can run far higher.
5. Calculate, then compare the net figure against fuel, tolls, time in line and the value of the space the pile is occupying. Copy the result if you want to compare two buyers side by side.

Sort Yard: the grade discipline game below the calculator

The game under the form is called Sort Yard. Mixed scrap rides a belt toward the end of the line and you route each piece into one of six bins: copper, brass, aluminum, stainless, steel and e-scrap. Each bin runs a live ticker showing its weight multiplied by the price of its current grade, using the same numbers as the table above, so you watch the calculator's formula tick over in real time.

Two rules make it a game rather than a chore. First, a bin holds the grade of its worst piece, permanently, so dropping a soldered elbow into the bare bright bin instantly reprices everything already in it. Second, several pieces are deliberate look-alikes: a thin silver sheet may be aluminum or galvanized steel, a gold-toned fitting may be clean yellow brass or brass with a steel stem, and a shiny grey panel may be non-magnetic 304 or magnetic 430. A magnet test and a scratch test resolve them, but you only get a limited number of tests per level, and the belt does not wait. Ship a bin before it gets contaminated and you bank its value; hold it to accumulate weight and you gamble.

Belt speed and the share of look-alike pieces both rise level by level. The score is money banked, which is exactly what the calculator computes, so a good run and a good sort are the same thing.

Preparing and grading scrap before you weigh in

Preparation is the cheapest lever a seller has. Stripping insulation from heavy cable moves it from the insulated line to the bare bright line, which on the example prices is a jump of $2.75 per pound. Cutting the steel bracket off an aluminum frame moves that frame from irony aluminum at $0.22 to extrusion at $0.86. Neither job needs anything more than a knife, a hacksaw and patience, and both are worth doing before you ever look at a price board.

Identification comes first, though, and two field tests do most of the work. A magnet separates ferrous from non-ferrous instantly and is the fastest way to catch galvanized steel hiding in an aluminum pile or a steel stem inside a brass valve; note that most 300-series stainless will not stick, which is itself the test for stainless. A scratch with a file or a blade cuts through paint, oxide and plating to show the base metal: red under a dull green patina is copper, yellow is brass, chalky white is aluminum, and bright silver on a heavy piece is stainless. Between them a magnet and a file resolve nearly every ambiguous piece a household load contains.

A few categories need a phone call before you load. Sealed vessels, pressurised cylinders, oily transmissions, refrigerant-bearing appliances, lead-acid batteries and anything with a utility marking are handled under separate rules or refused outright. Many buyers also require photo identification for non-ferrous material and impose holding periods on copper, which is a regional legal requirement rather than a yard preference. Checking first costs one call; discovering it at the gate costs the trip.

Limitations and assumptions behind this estimate

This calculator applies straightforward arithmetic to numbers you supply, so its accuracy is entirely the accuracy of your weights, your grades and your quoted prices. The main assumptions worth stating explicitly are these. It assumes each weight you enter is genuinely a single grade; a mixed container should be entered at the worst grade in it. It assumes the price you enter is the price for that grade on the day you sell, not a national average or a figure from last month. It assumes the deduction you enter reflects the buyer's actual practice, which is negotiated rather than published and varies between buyers on the same street.

The limitations run further than the arithmetic. Published spot prices for copper and aluminum are set on exchanges for refined metal, and a yard's buying price sits well below them to cover freight, processing, financing and margin, so an exchange quote is not a floor for what you will be offered. Minimum lot sizes matter too: a buyer may pay a lower tier for under a hundred pounds of non-ferrous. Some yards pay by net weight after a tare, others by gross weight with a percentage deduction, and the two conventions do not produce the same ticket. Prices for the same grade can differ by twenty percent between buyers a few miles apart. Finally, nothing here accounts for the value of your own time, the cost of the trip, or the regulatory requirements that apply where you live. Use the result to decide whether the trip is worth making, and settle the actual number at the scale.

Scrap metal value questions people ask

Recycling value beyond the ticket

Grade discipline and environmental benefit point the same way, because the load that is clean enough to earn a top price is also the load that recycles with the least reprocessing. Secondary production of aluminum and copper avoids the mining, beneficiation, smelting and refining that primary metal requires. If is the energy needed to make a tonne of primary metal and the energy needed to make the same tonne from scrap, the energy conserved per tonne is:

Formula: C = E_p − E_r

For aluminum that difference is famously large, which is why aluminum recycling survives even at low scrap prices. For the seller the practical version is simpler: the piece you separate is the piece that gets recycled as itself rather than diluted into a lower-value alloy stream, and it is also the piece that pays you the most.

Sources and further reading

• ReMA (formerly ISRI) Scrap Specifications Circular - the internationally used guidelines that define the grade names in the table above, including Barley (No. 1 copper wire, commonly traded as bare bright), Birch and Cliff (No. 2 copper wire and solids), and the aluminum specifications.
• U.S. Geological Survey, Copper Statistics and Information - annual Mineral Commodity Summaries covering U.S. copper supply, including the share of consumption met from old and new scrap.
• NIST Handbook 44 and Handbook 130 - the U.S. specifications, tolerances and technical requirements for commercial weighing devices, and the uniform regulation for the method of sale of commodities, which govern the legal-for-trade scale your load is weighed on.
• U.S. EPA, Facts and Figures about Materials, Waste and Recycling - national data on ferrous and non-ferrous metal generation and recycling rates.