Learn / How to Grade Scrap Metal
Grading just means sorting your scrap by type and cleanliness before you sell it. It sounds like extra work for not much reward. But it's usually the single easiest way to increase what a buyer will pay, sometimes by a large margin, for the exact same metal.
A buyer isn't just paying for the metal in your scrap. They're paying for how much additional work they'll need to do before that metal is usable. Clean, sorted, unmixed material can go almost straight into processing. Mixed, contaminated, or unsorted material needs to be sorted or cleaned first, which costs the buyer time and labour, cost they pass straight back to you as a lower price. Two loads of what is chemically the exact same copper can sell for noticeably different prices purely because of how well they were sorted before the sale.
Keep ferrous and non-ferrous apart from the start, then split non-ferrous further: copper, aluminium, brass, and lead all sell separately, never as one mixed pile.
Dirt, oil, food residue, and attached non-metal parts (plastic, rubber, wood) all reduce grade. A quick clean-up before you sell is almost always worth the price difference.
Removing easy-to-detach non-metal attachments (plastic housings, rubber hoses, wood handles) bumps material toward a cleaner, higher grade without much effort.
Don't remix once you've sorted. A bag of clean bare copper wire mixed back in with insulated cable gets priced at the lower blended rate, undoing the sorting work.
Copper shows the biggest grading gap of any common scrap metal, which makes it the clearest example. Clean, bare, unalloyed copper wire or tubing (often called "bare bright") is the top grade: no coating, no solder, no insulation. Copper with light oxidation, some solder, or paint sells at a step down. Copper still inside insulated cable sells for less again per kilogram of contained copper, because the buyer has to strip it before they can process the metal itself.
None of these are different metals. They're the same copper at three different levels of preparation. Check today's price for each copper grade to see exactly how much the gap is worth right now.
For a very small, casual load, probably not. The time cost isn't worth a small price difference. For anything approaching a business quantity, or high-value material like copper, grading almost always pays for the extra effort, sometimes doubling what you'd get for a mixed, uncleaned load.
Copper #1 is clean, unalloyed copper (bare wire, tubing, bus bar) with no coating, solder, or insulation. Copper #2 has some solder, paint, thin coating, or light oxidation. #1 sells for meaningfully more than #2 because it needs less processing before it can be reused.
It depends on volume and whether you have the right tools. Hand-stripping small amounts of cable can be worth it, but doing it unsafely (like burning insulation off, which is illegal in most places and dangerous) will cost you more than it saves. Many buyers accept insulated cable as-is at a lower price that already accounts for the recovery cost.
It matters for both, just less dramatically for ferrous. Clean, heavy steel (HMS 1) is worth more than mixed, painted, or coated steel (HMS 2 or light iron), but the gap is smaller in percentage terms than the gap between copper grades, because ferrous metal starts from a much lower base price.
Check a live price estimate, then list for free on the marketplace.
