If you have ever come across a sweet scrapping score of a few dozen, hundreds, or thousands of pounds of scrap cable or wire, it’s usually time for a small celebration. After your victory lap, it’s time to put your math skills to work and start figuring out what kind of profits and prices you can expect for your scrap copper. When you have wide gauge wire and cables for scrap, you may not have the time or correct tools to strip it down for the bare bright copper inside. So when you are faced with that situation, it is easy to figure out the recovery rate of copper from the cable you have with some simple math and a few minutes. Below, the iScrap App provides the tools and steps to calculate the copper recovery rate for your cables and wires.
Tools & Materials Needed:
- Copper Cable or Wire Sample (2-3 inch in length)
- Cable or Wire Cutter
- Box Knife or Razor Blade
- Small Scale with Gram Measurement
- Paper & Pen
- Calculator
How To Chart Your Copper Wire Recovery
- Cut a 2-3 inch sample of your material with the insulation, plastic, and copper intact. This can be done with a sawzall or a cable cutter.
- Once you have done that, place the sample on the gram scale and record its weight (see the above photo).
- Afterward, take your razor blade or box knife to slice the cable open so you can access every layer of the material inside and remove the different layers.
- Weigh the piece of insulation from the outside of the cable on the scale on its own and record the weight.
- Then, remove the next layer (if it is different from the previous one), whether that is copper foil, plastic, or more insulation. Weigh that and record it (see the photo to the right).
- Repeat this with any other materials other than the insulation until you reach the middle of the pieces of copper strands on the inside. Then, look to see if the copper in the middle is bare bright copper or tin-coated copper.
- If it is difficult to get all of the pieces of copper on the scale together to weigh, you can take a shortcut by weighing all the other materials and writing their weights down. From there, you can subtract them from the overall weight of the cable sample, and the result is your overall copper wire weight.
- Once you have the weight of your copper wire on the inside of the cable, take that number and divide it by the overall weight of the sample. The result will be the percentage copper recovery rate from your scrap cable or wire.
- Bring that number and the sample you deconstructed to your scrap yard. You can discuss a fair price for your copper scrap and understand what your yard looks for.
You can see an example of this procedure below, in a video that Tom, the creator of the iScrap App did:
If you have any questions regarding this step-by-step tutorial on copper recovery rate for your scrap cables, reach out to us via Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.
