A scale ticket has four numbers that decide what you are paid: gross, tare, net and grade. The one that goes wrong most often is tare, and it is priced at whatever grade you brought. A 40 pound tare error costs $5.28 on light iron and $231 on number 1 copper. In the United States any scale used to buy or sell by weight must be legal for trade and certified, and state law generally gives you a right to have a load reweighed on complaint.
Scrap Price Today market analysis, written from exchange settlement data, mill and refiner pricing practice and published policy documents. Figures are examples; today's numbers are on the live scrap price board.
Most sellers watch the price per pound and ignore the weighing. The price is printed on a board; the weighing happens once and is rarely checked.
The ticket, line by line
Gross weight. Everything that went on the scale: your metal, your containers and, on a drive-on scale, your vehicle and everything in it.
Tare weight. The non-metal portion that gets subtracted, meaning the empty container or the empty vehicle. This is calculated in one of three ways, and they are not equally reliable.
- Actual reweigh: you drive off, unload, and drive back on empty. The gold standard.
- Stored tare: the yard keeps a recorded tare for your vehicle or a regular container. Fine, provided nothing has changed.
- Preset deduction: a standard allowance for a bucket, drum or barrel type. Fastest, and the one worth asking about.
Net weight. Gross minus tare. This is what you are actually paid on.
Grade. Which price line the net weight is booked against, and the subject of our note on how to tell a well-paying yard.
A ticket that shows all four, per grade, is a ticket you can audit. One number and one price for a mixed load is not.
What an error is worth, by grade
This is the table nobody publishes, and it explains where to spend your attention.
| Error in the weighing | Light iron | Aluminium | Lead | Brass | Copper, number 1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 lb | $1.32 | $8.50 | $5.90 | $35.20 | $57.80 |
| 25 lb | $3.30 | $21.25 | $14.75 | $88.00 | $144.50 |
| 40 lb | $5.28 | $34.00 | $23.60 | $140.80 | $231.20 |
| 100 lb | $13.20 | $85.00 | $59.00 | $352.00 | $578.00 |
One pound of copper is worth about 44 pounds of light iron on our board today. So the same weighing error costs 44 times as much on the copper trip.
On a 500 pound load, an error of just one percent is 66 cents in light iron and $28.90 in copper. If you only ever check one weighing, check the non-ferrous one.
The tare mistake that is nobody's fault
On a drive-on scale, gross and tare must be taken with the vehicle in the same state. Same fuel, same passengers, same tools in the bed.
If you weigh in with a toolbox, a spare wheel and a full jerrycan, then take some of that out while unloading, your tare is lighter than it should be and your net is too high. That works in your favour, which is exactly why the reverse happens too and nobody notices.
Stay in the vehicle for both weighings, or get out for both. Do not change anything in between. This is the single most common source of an honest discrepancy.
What the law actually gives you
Commercial weighing is regulated, and the protections are stronger than most sellers realise.
Any scale used to buy or sell by weight must be legal for trade, certified under the national type evaluation programme, and local weights and measures officials inspect scales, apply security seals and require evidence of calibration.
State weights and measures statutes typically include provisions for certification of tare weight by a weighmaster, reweighing on complaint, and record keeping of public weighings. Penalties exist for false weighing, false certificates and fraudulent reports of weight, in some statutes extending to imprisonment and double damages.
You do not need to invoke any of that in normal circumstances. Knowing it exists is what makes a polite question a reasonable one.
How to check without accusing anyone
The practical route is an independent certified weight, and it is cheap.
Truck stops with certified scales and agricultural co-ops or grain elevators will weigh a vehicle for a few dollars. Weigh loaded on the way in, weigh empty on the way out, and you have a certified net weight to compare against the yard ticket.
At a typical few dollars, that check pays for itself if it protects about one pound of copper. On a ferrous load it would need to protect nearly 40 pounds to be worth doing, which tells you when to bother.
If the numbers disagree, the productive approach is to ask for help rather than to allege anything. Scales genuinely drift: loader impacts misalign decks, load cell cables get damaged, and pit scales take on water after heavy rain. A yard that cares will want to know.
Deductions, which are separate from weighing
Moisture, dirt and contamination deductions are legitimate and normal, commonly in the range of a few percent, but they should be stated on the line rather than applied silently.
A wet load genuinely contains water you are asking to be paid for. A load with concrete counterweights in it genuinely contains concrete. The issue is never that deductions exist; it is whether you were told the number.
Ask two questions: what deduction are you applying, and is it shown on the ticket.
A routine that takes five minutes
- Empty the vehicle of anything that will not be unloaded, before you weigh in.
- Ask whether your tare is a reweigh, a stored figure or a preset deduction.
- Watch the display during weighing. Reputable yards face it towards you.
- Ask for a printed ticket showing gross, tare, net and grade per line.
- Keep tickets. A run of them tells you far more about a yard than any single visit.
- Get an independent certified weight once, on a non-ferrous load, as a baseline.
What this metal pays around the world
Scrap is a global market priced in US dollars, but what reaches a seller depends on trade position, freight to the nearest consumer and how many buyers compete locally. The table below converts the same grade into each market’s own currency and units at the day’s exchange rate, and shows the factor we apply.
| Market | Local price | USD per lb | Market factor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Turkey | ₺640.99 / kg | $5.91 | 1.04 |
| Germany | €11.41 / kg | $5.79 | 1.02 |
| United States | $5.68 / lb | $5.68 | 1.00 |
| China | CN¥82.37 / kg | $5.57 | 0.98 |
| Canada | C$7.85 / lb | $5.51 | 0.97 |
| United Kingdom | £9.09 / kg | $5.45 | 0.96 |
| Australia | A$17.09 / kg | $5.40 | 0.95 |
| United Arab Emirates | AED43.69 / kg | $5.40 | 0.95 |
| Saudi Arabia | SAR43.67 / kg | $5.28 | 0.93 |
| India | ₹1,116 / kg | $5.23 | 0.92 |
| Bangladesh | ৳1,356 / kg | $5.00 | 0.88 |
| South Africa | R177.11 / kg | $4.83 | 0.85 |
Method
The grade prices used in the error table are our own daily board, documented on the editorial policy page, with live figures on the board and a weight converter at the calculator. The error costs are simple multiplication, which is the point: they are checkable rather than argued.
The regulatory description is drawn from published guidance on legal-for-trade certification and from state weights and measures statutes, which differ by jurisdiction. Check your own state's provisions before relying on any specific remedy, and note that requirements outside the United States are set by different bodies entirely.
We do not buy scrap and take no referral fees. Nothing here suggests yards are generally dishonest; the industry view, which matches ours, is that most are not and that the ones who are do not last. The case for checking is that honest errors are common and expensive on the good grades.