You might already know plenty about scrap metal. You know that if you take it to a Scrap It location in Massachusetts or New Hampshire, we’ll pay you for what you might otherwise think of as rubbish. We’ll take that junk you stumble over every time you walk around in your basement, garage, or junk closet and recycle it into something useful for people around the world.
You might also know that finding ways to reuse that unwanted metal is good for the environment. But what happens to your old car radiator, copper fixtures, dead appliance, or other unwanted materials big and small, once you turn them over to us and get paid on the spot?
Here’s a hint: you might see your scrap metal the next time you buy your patio furniture, a new door or appliance, a computer, a bike, a set of tools, the wires threading through your home, or anything with metal framing. Even cars, airplanes, and rockets are made with recycled parts!
Look around your house. The chances are good that everything you see that’s made wholly or in part of steel, aluminum, copper, iron, or other ferrous or non-ferrous metals has been recycled. Either that or it will, in time, achieve new life as something else through recycling.
Your wallet and local landfill will thank you. Not to mention that you’ll never again trip over that rusting piece of junk in your basement or garage.
What are examples of recycled scrap metal?
Metal will always remain the same metal, which means it can be melted down and reused in numerous ways. Sometimes, pure metals are kept pure to be re-poured into fresh parts. They can also be combined with other metals to create alloys and new materials.
Let’s look at the potential life cycle of those rusted gutters or the replaced front door you are thinking of turning over to us for cash.
We might sell your scrap steel to an end user in Turkey. This processor will turn your unwanted metal into rebar for concrete construction. Then the company will sell that end product all over the world. Years from now, the rebar could be recycled and turned into something else.
Aluminum can be recycled into car panels, cookware, house siding, bikes, wires, and seemingly billion of soda and beer cans.
Copper materials are great for scrap metal recycling. The cleanest copper, called copper #1, is pure or nearly pure. One advantage is that it can be quickly and easily recycled into pipes, tubes, or wiring after a trip to the blast furnace. Your scrap copper #1 might be back on the market to be resold as new versions of those same products in as little as three months.
“Dirty” copper #2 is scrap that might include other metal alloys, but it, too, will find a second life. It might be used in telecommunications or electronic equipment production, among many other applications.
Why is recycled metal so valuable?
Here’s why scrap metal recycling is so important: for most purposes, it works just as well as metal that’s been newly mined out of the ground, but it’s cheaper. This is a win-win. If you were a manufacturer who could buy newly mined metal, but the recycled version worked just as well and cost you a lot less—well, that’s kind of a no-brainer, isn’t it?
Bottom line, most metals can be endlessly melted down, then processed into something else to be sold again and again to manufacturers who make numerous items with the newly reclaimed metal.
That’s why your scrap metal is so important to us at Scrap It, and it’s why we want to offer you top dollar for every qualified item you bring in to us. Never haul your scrap metal out to the curb as if it were garbage. It’s not!
If you don’t profit from your unwanted metal, your municipality (or some guy with a pickup truck who hits your neighborhood on garbage day) probably will.
Trade trash for cash
To make your life even easier (and a bit more profitable), just stop in at one of our three locations whenever you have metal to sell. Check out the hours of Scrap It locations in the Boston and Worcester area and in and around Marlborough, New Hampshire, here.
When you visit, ask us about our rewards program for frequent sellers. You’ll get points in addition to cash for your metal. After you accumulate enough points, you’ll earn an even bigger payday.
Let us take that dead refrigerator or water heater, the junker car, or boxed bits of easily recyclable scrap metal off of your hands today. Get it out of your house and out of your way, knowing you benefit from the cash and the world benefits from your choice to recycle.