Aluminium Scrap
"Aluminium is aluminium" is one of the more expensive assumptions a seller can make. Window frame offcuts, a bag of drink cans, and flat sheet from a fabrication job are three genuinely different products that price differently, and mixing them together usually costs you more than the sorting effort would. Here's what separates them, what each is actually worth, and when you're better off skipping scrap trading altogether.
Clean, uncoated window and door extrusions, pushed through a die rather than rolled or cast. The grade most construction and renovation offcuts fall into.
Used beverage cans, baled. Thin, coated, and a completely different product to extrusion or sheet, priced and processed on its own.
Clean flat-rolled aluminium with no coating, from cladding, signage, and general fabrication offcuts.
Extrusion generally holds the most value of the three, it's a specific 6063 alloy, pushed through a die rather than cast or rolled, and usually the cleanest form sellers have from window and door offcuts. Sheet sits close behind, clean and uncoated but rolled rather than extruded. Cans are their own category entirely, thin, coated, and processed through a different recycling stream to either. Keeping the three separated when you sort matters more here than for almost any other metal on the platform, since mixing them means the whole lot prices toward the lowest grade present.
Telling them apart is usually straightforward on sight. Extrusion has a consistent, machined cross-section, window and door frame profiles are the classic example, and no paint, powder-coating, or anodised finish if it's going to grade as clean 6063. Sheet is flat stock with a uniform thickness and no profile shape at all. Cans are unmistakable on their own, thin-walled, printed or coated, and need to be baled or at least collected in real bulk before they're worth listing separately from your council recycling bin.
ScrapTrade's three live-priced aluminium categories match the grades above exactly: clean 6063 extrusion, baled UBC cans, and clean uncoated sheet. Cast aluminium, wheels, engine parts, or anything painted or anodised falls outside these three specific categories, list it as mixed alloy scrap instead of hoping it slips through as clean extrusion or sheet.
Check today's aluminium pricesIf what you've got is a household bag of empty drink cans, scrap trading almost certainly isn't the best option. Every Australian state and territory now runs a container deposit scheme paying 10 cents per eligible container, Australia became the first continent fully covered by these schemes once Tasmania and the Northern Territory came online. For a small, casual amount, that per-container refund outperforms bulk scrap-metal pricing by a wide margin.
ScrapTrade's Aluminium Cans (UBC) category is built for a different scale entirely, genuine baled bulk volume from a business, a collection operation, or someone consolidating real quantity, not a single household's recycling. If that's your situation, it's a real, tradeable category with its own live price, worth checking rather than assuming cans aren't worth listing at all.
Aluminium follows construction activity closely, especially extrusion and sheet from window, door, and cladding work. Gold Coast has one of the country's most sustained high-rise and residential construction pipelines, generating real, ongoing volumes of aluminium from fit-outs and demolitions specifically, not just as a side product of other trades. Wollongong is better known for heavy steel, Port Kembla's steelworks dominate the local identity, but the Illawarra region's dense construction and demolition activity generates a genuine, steady non-ferrous stream alongside it, aluminium included.
Neither city is a requirement. Renovators, fabricators, and demolition contractors generate aluminium scrap anywhere in Australia, and ScrapTrade connects buyers and sellers nationally regardless of where a listing is posted from.
Aluminium is one of the most efficient metals to recycle in genuine use today. Producing it from scrap uses roughly 95% less energy than producing it from raw ore, since recycled aluminium melts and re-forms without losing strength or purity. That gap is exactly why clean, correctly-sorted aluminium, whichever of the three grades it falls into, commands a real, consistent price rather than being treated as a low-value by-product.
Clean extrusion or sheet mixed with even a small amount of cast aluminium, wheels or engine parts left in the load, typically gets priced down as generic mixed alloy, because it's faster for a buyer to price the whole lot cautiously than to sort it themselves. On ScrapTrade, you check a live reference price first, list your correctly-sorted material at a fixed price, run it as a live auction so verified buyers compete for it, or negotiate directly, negotiation is on by default on every listing. Every listing is GPS-video verified before it goes live, and payment sits in escrow from the moment a deal is confirmed until pickup or delivery is done, so neither side is exposed first. The full case for why that beats a single yard quote is on Why Choose ScrapTrade and Trust & Safety.
They're made differently and usually carry different alloys and coatings. Extrusion is pushed through a die and is generally the cleanest, highest-value form. Cans are thin, coated, and processed through a completely different recycling stream. Sheet sits between the two. Same base metal, genuinely different products.
Probably not, your state's container deposit scheme (10 cents per eligible container, now available everywhere in Australia) will almost always pay better for a small, casual amount than bulk scrap pricing does. ScrapTrade's Aluminium Cans (UBC) category is aimed at genuine baled bulk volume, a business or high-volume collector, not a household recycling bag.
No, cast aluminium is a different alloy to extrusion and grades separately. Mixing it in gets the whole lot priced down as mixed alloy scrap instead of clean 6063 extrusion. Keep cast pieces, like wheels or engine parts, in their own pile.
No, both extrusion and sheet grades specifically require no coating. Painted or anodised material is still valuable aluminium, it just falls into a different, lower-priced category, worth noting honestly in your listing rather than having a buyer discover it on inspection.
Sort and photograph it clearly before you list, keeping extrusion, sheet, and any cast pieces visibly separate. Check a live reference price first, then run it as a live auction so verified buyers assess your actual, correctly-sorted material rather than pricing toward a cautious average.
Only if it's genuinely clean and uncoated. A lot of roofing and guttering aluminium is painted or coated for weather resistance, which moves it out of the clean sheet category into a lower-priced painted or mixed grade, worth checking before you assume it grades the same as offcut stock from a workshop.
Check a live price, then sell at a fixed price, run an auction, or negotiate directly.
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