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Most businesses that call themselves metal recyclers don’t actually turn old junk into new metal. They are primarily collectors, aggregators. They process the junk, to varying degrees, and sort it into piles big enough to sell on down the chain to someone who can take it to the next stage. This is exactly what Steve does, on the scale of a single person. He gets some of his material for free from dumpsters but also buys a bit here and there. One day, he showed me a bale of wire that he’d bought from a movie-set decorator who was retiring and needed to get rid of all the gear he’d accumulated. He offered Steve the wire at a cut rate, which Steve accepted once the decorator cleaned off the colored tape stuck all over it. That left Steve to strip the rubber coating off with a box cutter. “So, he’s doing some of the work, I’m doing most of the work, but we’re both gonna come away with something,” Steve says without rancor. 

It’s rare that Steve finds enough pure metal to make it worthwhile to take it straight to the scrapyard. Most of what he finds can be made more valuable if he processes it—putting in the effort to strip the wires, break off the brass valves, and otherwise sort and separate out the metals as much as he can by himself—rather than selling the scrap as he found it.

Excerpted from Chp 8 of Power Metal: The Race for the Resources that will shape the future by Vince Beiser.