Stainless steel has been talked about many times but it always warrants a revisit. There are different types of stainless but one of the biggest things that we stress is having the stainless steel being CLEAN. Cleaning stainless is the biggest problem when it comes to scrapping. Let’s take a dishwasher for example.
Clean Stainless Steel
Dishwashers have a rubber/plastic liner around them, but sometimes the inner shell is clean. You may take a dishwasher apart and find a rubber that was sprayed on and you may think that the scrap yard will not consider that dirty because there is not a lot of weight to it…but it will be dirty and that will be a problem for you when you go to cash in.
Dirty Stainless Steel
Dirty stainless is priced between 50-90% below a clean stainless price because of all of the attachments and contaminants to the stainless steel. You should never waste too much time cleaning stainless when it has been pressed on or riveted together because even those small pieces of steel will still downgrade your pricing.
Remember there are many different grades of stainless steel scrap, but the more common ones are 304 and 316. If you don’t know what kind of grade you have, ask your scrap yard if they can test the kind of grade that you have so you know how to separate the different kinds before they are weighed up.
Questions on your stainless steel?
Just let us know and we will help you get an answer as soon as possible.
