What Is It Worth as Scrap, and Where Does It Go?

Most household metal falls into one of three routes: sell it, give it away free, or pay to have it taken. Which route applies is decided by value per pound, not by how big the item is. Clean copper is $5.79 a pound today, so a bathroom's worth of pipe is about $69. Light steel is $0.132 a pound, so a washing machine is about $48 and a filing cabinet about $9. Below roughly $30 of metal, no single item justifies a trip to a yard.

Scrap Price Today publishes daily reference prices for fifteen scrap grades in twenty countries. This page applies those prices to the things people actually have in a garage, so you can decide what to do with an item before you move it.

The three routes, and how to tell which one applies

Almost every disposal question resolves into one of three answers. The mistake most people make is choosing by size, when the deciding number is value per pound.

• Sell it. The metal is worth more than the cost of getting it to a buyer. In practice that means a load worth more than about $30, which is roughly what a twenty-mile round trip and an hour of your time costs.
• Give it away free. The item has real metal value but not enough to justify your trip, and someone already running a collection round will take it at no charge. Appliances, cast iron and bulk steel sit here.
• Pay to remove it. The item costs more to handle than it contains. Televisions with leaded glass, mattresses, and anything requiring certified treatment before it can be broken belong here.

The threshold is arithmetic rather than opinion. At $0.132 a pound for light steel you need about 230 pounds to clear $30. At $5.79 a pound for copper you need five pounds. That is why a vanload of appliances is worth the drive and a single dryer is not, and why a small bag of copper pipe beats both.

What household items are actually worth

These figures are our current reference grades multiplied by typical item weights. They are a working basis for your own calculation, not a quote; weigh your own material, because weights vary widely by model and age.

Items worth selling on their own

Items worth collecting, but not worth a special trip

Items that usually cost money rather than earning it

• Cathode ray tube televisions and monitors. Leaded glass has a disposal cost, and most recyclers charge rather than pay.
• Flat panel televisions. Modest recoverable value, but few general yards buy them whole; a specialist e-scrap processor is the route.
• Fridges and air conditioners before refrigerant recovery. They become payable items only after a certified technician has recovered the refrigerant.
• Mattresses, upholstery and treated timber. No metal value beyond a light steel frame.
• Anything with unknown asbestos or PCB content. Testing and licensed handling cost more than the metal is worth.

How to work out any item yourself

The method is the same for everything, and it takes a minute.

1. Weigh it, or estimate from a similar known weight.
2. Identify the dominant metal. A magnet does most of the work: it sticks to steel and iron, and does not stick to copper, brass, aluminium, lead or most stainless.
3. Multiply by the grade price on the live board, or use the calculator.
4. Subtract your trip. Fuel, time and any tolls come off the total, which is why the $30 threshold matters.
5. Check whether a rule applies before you move it, using the section below.

Worked example. A washing machine weighs about 160 pounds, is almost entirely light steel with a motor and a short harness, and comes to roughly $48. Two of them plus a fridge clears $130 and is worth a trip. One of them, alone, is not.

The rules that stop a sale

More loads are refused for paperwork and safety than for grade. These are the ones that actually come up.

• Refrigerant. Fridges, freezers and air conditioners must have refrigerant recovered by a certified technician before disposal. Yards ask for evidence and refuse untagged units.
• Gas cylinders. No yard accepts a sealed pressure vessel. A helium or propane cylinder needs the valve removed or certification that it is empty before it becomes ordinary steel.
• Catalytic converters. Identification and proof of ownership are now required in most markets, with non-cash payment and buyer record keeping.
• Copper cable. Provenance is checked everywhere, and California has required a seller licence for scrap copper since the start of the year.
• Vehicles. Title or deregistration paperwork is required, and the destruction designation is irreversible in most states.
• Asbestos and PCBs. Wiring and pipe lagging from before the late 1980s, and transformers from before 1979, need testing rather than dismantling.
• Identification. Licensed yards record photo ID for non-ferrous everywhere, and several states add fingerprints, photographs and posted payment.

Where each category legitimately goes

• Non-ferrous metal, in any quantity worth carrying: a licensed scrap yard, sorted by grade.
• Appliances and bulk steel: a scrap yard if you have a load, a free collection round if you have one item, municipal bulky waste if neither.
• Electronics: a specialist e-scrap processor or a manufacturer or retailer take-back scheme; general yards rarely want whole devices.
• Batteries: lead-acid to any auto parts retailer or yard; lithium and alkaline to their own separate channels, never mixed in.
• Fluids: used oil and old fuel to a retailer or municipal collection point, never to a yard and never to the ground.
• Gas cylinders: back to the supplier where a return scheme exists, otherwise a licensed disposal route, then the steel.

Sell, give away, or pay: a worked comparison

The three routes are easiest to see against one realistic clear-out: a garage containing a washing machine, a dryer, a filing cabinet, a steel bicycle, an old barbecue and a bathroom's worth of copper pipe.

The pattern holds generally. If a load contains copper, brass, aluminium, a vehicle or a converter, selling is almost always right. If it is bulk steel and appliances only, free collection usually beats both alternatives. Paying is the correct answer for televisions, unrecovered cooling appliances and anything needing certified handling.

Where to go next

• Live scrap price board for today's fifteen grades, and the calculator to convert your own weights.
• Best metals to scrap ranks material by price per pound and by money per hour of work.
• What a junk car is worth applies the same method to a vehicle, part by part.
• Where the copper hides gives published copper content for every appliance in a house.
• How to prepare scrap metal for sale covers sorting, cutting and the paperwork.
• How to tell a well-paying yard is the benchmark test for checking any quote.
• Country and city prices converts every grade into local currency and units.

Common mistakes

• Driving one appliance to a yard. The metal rarely covers the fuel.
• Selling a mixed load at one price. Each grade should be its own line on the ticket; sorting typically returns 15 to 25 percent more.
• Assuming heavy means valuable. A cast iron bath at 300 pounds is worth less than a bathroom's copper pipe at 12 pounds.
• Leaving the valuable parts in. A car body is $360 a ton, but the converter, battery, wheels, radiator and harness are worth more than the shell on many vehicles.
• Taking cooling appliances without a refrigerant tag, which wastes the trip entirely.
• Paying for removal of a load that would have been collected free.

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.

What Scrap Price Today is, and what it is not

We publish daily indicative scrap prices derived from public exchange settlements and published index data, in local currency for twenty countries and thirty-one cities. The method, including every recovery share we apply, is on our editorial policy page.

We do not buy or sell scrap, we do not operate a directory, we do not rank or list yards, and we take no payment or referral fees from buyers. That is a deliberate limitation. A reference is only useful for checking what a buyer tells you if it is independent of buyers.

Use this page when you want to know whether something is worth money and where it should go. Use a licensed local yard for an actual quote, and treat any figure here as a starting point for that conversation rather than a price you are owed.

Frequently asked questions