GeoffM

Good point. I wasn't planning on leaving it out though as I've never seen these roaming scavengers. I was more thinking about the people that advertise free collections on Craiglist - or if there's some other place that will "buy" your scrap. I'm thinking I ought to be grateful that they'll just haul it away for free! I don't need to buy a new one, which usually comes with some incentive/coupon as well as taking it away for free.

Michael

My current elbow is behind the disposal so it is hard to get at so it is much easier to use the plunger and hope I don't end up with a major mess.

Pulaski

If you have a truck, take it to your local scrap yard, I'll guarantee you'll get $30 for it, maybe $35 if it's a heavy one.

In my garage I have the one that came with my house ten years ago, and which recently stopped working. If I can find time I'll strip the compressor, motor, pipes and wires out of it, as they're worth more, but even "as is", it's $35 of scrap.

Pulaski

I'll guarantee they don't go to the landfill. Many are loaded into empty freight containers and shipped to the Far East where they are dismantled and recycled.

Yorkieabroad

Is that what they do with them? I never knew....there must be some money in them if its worth shipping them all the way over there!

Yorkieabroad

Sounds like a legal nightmare that noone would want to get into with the homeowner changing their mind. May be a little easier with a 3rd party collecting it. Maybe that's why sometimes you see those "free please take away" signs....
like you say, low on the care meter....doubt I'm ever going to have "donors remorse" on something I've kicked to the curb!

Pulaski

He11 yeah, a scrap dealer gets about 50% more for a truck or container full than he pays "retail" for them, so he'll get about $30 for a washer and close to $50 for a s/s fridge. Purely on space you could probably get 120 washers in a 53' freight container (180 stacked three high), so you'd be looking at about $3,500 wholesale for a container of scrap washers. Cheap labour in the Far East breaks them down for their steel and copper content, and whatever else is in there, and not all go to the Far East, as there is still a lot of steel made in the US, but much of that is recycled scrap, not from iron ore.

Anything you can break apart before you sell it fetches more, and the (almost entirely in-door) facility I sell scrap to has numerous separate boxes, like the ones used to transport pumpkins and watermelons, for copper plumbing, copper cable (installed), copper flex/ cords, aluminum cable, plumbing fittings, pure brass (not soldered to copper), scrap lead, "irony aluminium", radiator cores (mixed copper and aluminum), motors, soda cans, etc, etc. Even AC and fridge compressors have their own bin, though I'm not sure what they're made of, but they're d@mned heavy! Each bin has its own market price, but if you don't break them down, you just get the scrap iron and steel rate of about 12¢/lb.

Yorkieabroad

Doesn't leave a lot of margin once they've paid the freight on that....from the west coast to China they are probably looking at $1500-2000 for a 40' depending on where they take it...so what's the angle - worth more once they're broken down? Someone is paying them for "recycle credits"?

Yorkieabroad

Does anyone use their local freecyle? I get rid of a lot of stuff on there - things the kids have grown out of (physically or mentally), stuff that we're done with that still has life but isn't worth selling, all sorts of things. I rarely get anything off it, but did pick up some bits and pieces for a stage costume for one of the kiddos a couple of years ago - trousers and a jacket that he used, and then I freecycled them on to someone else.

GeoffM

I doubt they pay that much TBH. Most containers going to the Far East are empty so I would imagine it's much cheaper to ship in that direction - something like for every 2.5 full containers coming to the US, only one full one goes back (and the rest empty).

Yorkieabroad

Yeah, but even empty containers are expensive to move - its a major cost that the container companies try to minimize with capacity swaps and the like. I ran a quick estimate on one of the online shippers, and theirs came in at $1900 for LA - China. Granted a regular commercial shipper would get cheaper than a non-commercial quote, but some of that was wharfage and carnage etc that will be fixed. Even if they managed to negotiate a 50% discount, its still a big chunk of change out of a cargo worth 3500.

Cape Blue

Most scrap white goods will end up in a US-based shredding plant along with cars. Some might get diverted as reusable and the compressors from fridges will be removed first (and the CFCs captured).

The shredding plant rips them to pieces and separates the steel from the non-ferrous and non-metallic fractions. A car last about 8 seconds in a large "auto-shredder" (or fragmentiser as they are also called).

Once you have fist-sized granules of clean steel (etc) they are loaded onto ships and sold to steelworks throughout the world. Cleaned non-ferrous (aluminum, copper, brass, zinc, stainless steel, etc) gets sold globally as well, shipped loose in 20 or 40 ft containers.

Motors and other composite electrical devices get sold to China where they are dismantled by hand. Compressors fit in this category as mostly copper but also steel etc.

The big volumes going to China for dismantling are electronic waste streams televisions, computers, printers - these often contain a lot of hazards such as mercury bulbs, lithium batteries, brominated flame retardants etc - they are expensive to process in EPA/OSHA-regulated USA and cheap using children in China (In the EU it is illegal to export, in USA not).

Pulaski

Except that most (I've heard 75-80% range) freight containers that arrive full of merchandise from the Far East are loaded onto container ships empty for the return trip to the Far East. And each container has to be individually loaded and unloaded whether full or not, so wholesale shippers can negotiate very low rates to ship low value materials to the Far East.

Yorkieabroad

I get the concept of backhaul rates - I ran tankers (along with coal, ore carriers and general bulk carriers, but never container ships) for most of my career, and they generally have about the worst laden:ballast ratio of any shipping out there, especially the big crude ships, but there is a limit to how deep the backhaul discount can go, even when you're desperate to relocate the asset. I'm just struggling to see the freight go so low as to make the containerized shipping of whole washing machines for recycling viable as an ongoing business on the values you mentioned. Stranger things have happened though...when we were fixing 300ktonners at $4000/day it seemed like the market would never recover until we were suddenly fixing them a couple of years later at $120,000 a day!

Yorkieabroad

Looks like this guy put too many empty boxes in the middle and all his full ones on the pointy end.....don't click the link if your entire house contents are currently in a metal box on a ship on the way to your new home....