Dirty stainless steel. You find it, you see it, you sell it. Pretty simple right? You probably see some of the small amount of contaminants on it and think to yourself that there won’t be a big discount for small amounts of material, but you never know.
How Do You Scrap Dirty Stainless Steel?
Then you get to the scrap yard, you go to sell you material and look at that, the price is SO LOW! Why is this? Scrap yards have a hard time processing stainless steel for many reasons and that is why the prices will be so low.
The easiest (and really the only way) to process stainless steel is with a plasma cutter. Plasma cutters are excellent tools, but very few scrap yards have them because of their high costs as well as having a skilled man on hand to make sure that they can use it correctly.
Suggested Reading: Secret To Scrapping Stainless Steel
To have stainless clean sometimes is a near impossible thing to do and unless you have tried cleaning stainless before you won’t know what we mean.
Another Easy Place for Stainless Steel
Here is another piece of stainless that you may try to sell as clean but it never is…sinks. Sinks from residential homes almost always have a glue or a rubber coating and unless you sit there with a razorblade (please NEVER) do this and taken every piece of glue off you will never be able to sell that sink as a clean stainless.
Suggested Reading: 6 Places To Find Stainless Steel
So scrappers, the next time that you are looking to clean your stainless, ask someone on our iScrap Metal Forum or at your scrap yard that you found through iScrap their advice. It is very hard to do and very easy to screw up.
