After collection, cable goes through mechanical shredding, magnetic separation to remove any steel content such as armour, and granulation, which chops the material down and uses airflow to separate copper granules from plastic insulation. Properly processed cable recovers up to around 99% of the copper content, which is then sold on to be remelted into…
The two most common scrap cable scams are rigged or hidden scales that under-report your weight, and dealers who misgrade good cable as a lower quality to cut your payment. The biggest hidden risk is leaving cable out for an unlicensed collector, since the householder, not just the collector, can be fined for the waste…
How to Prepare Scrap Cable Before Selling for More Money The preparation that actually increases your scrap cable price is sorting by grade, removing plugs and fittings, and keeping cable dry. Manually stripping insulation only pays off on large volumes of high grade single-core cable, where the jump from insulated to bare copper pricing is…
How Scrap Cable Prices Are Calculated: The Full Breakdown Scrap cable prices are set by three things multiplied together: the world copper price (set daily on the London Metal Exchange), the grade of your specific cable (which determines what percentage of it is recoverable copper), and the yard’s processing discount, which covers stripping, granulating and…
Cable Wire Recycling buys four main grades: dry bright wire (bare, stripped copper), high grade 60% cable (thick insulated cable with a high copper ratio), household cable (twin and earth, flex, and similar domestic wiring), and low grade armoured cable (steel wire armoured cable with thick outer protection). The grade is set by how much…
Type cable recycling into any search engine and within a page or two you will find someone insisting that stripping cable before you sell it is free money. Bare copper pays the top rate, cable pays less, so strip the plastic off and pocket the difference. Simple. We weigh cable and copper for a living,…
Every construction project produces cable waste. First fix generates offcuts by the binful. Strip out phases on refurbishment jobs pull whole circuits from ceilings and risers. Temporary site supplies come down at handover. On a medium commercial project, the cable adds up to hundreds of kilos, and how you handle it decides whether it becomes…
Not all cable earns the same money. Two bags that weigh the same can be worth very different amounts, and the difference comes down to grading. If you work with commercial or industrial electrical installations, understanding what recyclers mean by high grade cable is the single most useful thing you can learn, because it changes…