Metal thieves in America's cities

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/09/us/copper-theft-heavy-metal.html

by gumby • 2 years ago

63 185 2 years ago

nytimes.com

office_drone• 2 years ago

https://archive.is/RiuFM

tomcam• 2 years ago

Be nice if the cities had police, and if they had prosecutors willing to put people in jail for property theft.

gjsman-10003• 2 years ago

If I hear “but the underlying causes” or “maybe they’re poor” one more time, so help me…

But seriously, this isn’t an either/or game. We can and should fight the underlying causes simultaneously while arresting people, temporarily preventing them from doing further damage.

Also, part of life is realizing there are people who commit crime just for the heck of it, who have no interest in reform, and arrive at that lifestyle from a wide array of backgrounds. I still vividly remember when a news station in LA chased a beggar and found they lived in a mansion.

silverquiet3• 2 years ago

That beggar must have inherited a lot of wealth because you normally have to commit way more lucrative crimes to own an LA mansion.

ok_dad3• 2 years ago

I guess we solid fund the scrap yards taking this material and punish them too, since they enable it. I suggest we jail the execs and managers there for not putting systems in place to prevent paying for stolen materials. I bet this would stop it really quick, and we only have to prosecute a few people rather than every thief, because of supply and demand; reducing demand immensely will make it not worth stealing infrastructure.

RRWagner2• 2 years ago

That would be contrary to lower taxes and less government, which many people claim to want.

pclmulqdq3• 2 years ago

The highest tax cities I have been in have the worst police, the worst roads, and the worst trash handling. Police and other basic services are very cheap compared to many of the programs undertaken by high-tax cities.

VoodooJuJu2• 2 years ago

Cities typically vote for higher taxes and more government, on the contrary.

RRWagner2• 2 years ago

That would be contrary to lower taxes and less government, which many people claim to want.

vondur• 2 years ago

Hmm, I see two examples from Los Angeles California, which isn't known for lower taxes and less government.

pjmorris• 2 years ago

It'd be nice if people were well-off enough that they didn't have to strip-mine the infrastructure.

The economic optimization continues.

kurthr• 2 years ago

It's pretty easy to do a few $k of drugs in a week. Do the calculation.

The people buying the "recycled" metal are the ones making bank. Why bother investigating or prosecuting them?

Also, this has been going on for decades.

VoodooJuJu2• 2 years ago

I think it's more important for the cities to be tolerant and inclusive of theft culture. Theft is just part and parcel of living in a large city and diversity makes us stronger.

sneak2• 2 years ago

It costs way more to jail people. Prison isn’t free.

IncreasePosts2• 2 years ago

Who cares? The point is we live in a society of laws, not that we choose which laws have teeth because the cost of punishing someone is greater than the cost of the crime.

dymk2• 2 years ago

Scrap recyclers should be required to keep a log of who they're buying scrap from, so there's a paper trail to identify patterns with. Some states require scrap yards to do that with catalytic converters, for the same reason.

rwmj• 2 years ago

There was the same issue in the UK a few years ago (with thieves even stripping copper war memorials), and the solution was indeed this, making recyclers demand ID from people and keep logs.

PlunderBunny• 2 years ago

Ditto New Zealand. The first time I took some scrap metal to a dealer, I had to fill in a lot of paperwork, but subsequent visits required me to only show my id.

50208• 2 years ago

This ... it's the recyclers that need to stop this ... or be forced to stop it.

sneak2• 2 years ago

These people are buying valuable resources for pennies on the dollar in cash. They are hugely incentivized to not ask too many questions.

christophilus• 2 years ago

Hence, “should be required to…” If you make non-compliance with the law far more painful than the profits from illegal metals, you’ve fixed the incentive problem.

spicybbq• 2 years ago

Many states require photos, fingerprints, record retention, and other restrictions on scrap metal dealers:

https://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/scrap-theft-complianc...

haburka• 2 years ago

Insane that we are at the level of poverty where deconstructing infrastructure makes economic sense to people. It’s insane the amount of effort and shamelessness people are willing to go through for a few hundred bucks. When you consider how high minimum wage is in LA too, it’s ridiculous they can’t find work instead of going as low as this.

glass1122• 2 years ago

when you are hungry, poor and desperate, the lines between shameless, guilt all starting to vanish.

sporc• 2 years ago

more like "fiending" than "hungry".

docandrew• 2 years ago

When they put hidden cameras inside packages to catch porch pirates, plenty of thieves have a decent apartment, big screen TV. They’re not stealing groceries, they’re stealing things to fence.

ryandrake• 2 years ago

It's hard to value something you don't have a stake in.

Fewer and fewer people have a stake in their communities and their community's prosperity. Fewer have a stake in the housing market. Fewer have a stake in our institutions working properly. Fewer have a stake in capitalism itself. It's not surprising that these things are slowly becoming devalued. The solution may involve welcoming back more people as stakeholders in society rather than pushing them away.

Kalium2• 2 years ago

I suspect you will find that in many cases, people whose brains have been hijacked by chemical dependency may experience some difficulty in behaving as a stakeholder in society. It will often not stack up favorably against feeding that dependency, no matter how much they might favor it in the abstract.

fallingknife2• 2 years ago

There have always been thieves and the "they are only criminals because they are victims" line is nonsense. It is a risk vs reward calculation for them and it's not a surprise that the crime is more popular when you reduce the risk with minimal punishment.

baggy_trough4• 2 years ago

Level of poverty? Nonsense. More like, level of opportunity given lack of enforcement.

BadHumans3• 2 years ago

It's not nonsense but neither is what you said. Both things can be true. There is a high level of poverty and large wealth disparity. There is also a lack of enforcement.

asdff3• 2 years ago

A large part of the rise in metals theft in recent years is from organized crime increasingly investing in and optimizing the sector.

IncreasePosts2• 2 years ago

It has nothing to do with poverty, and everything to do with some people prioritizing money for themselves over the externalities.

"If I make $100, and some stranger who I don't know loses $10,000...well, sucks to be that stranger, he should have paid a security guard to watch his wires" is the mindset of a whole load of people in the world.

Hell, I mean, there are people out there who will kill you for your $100 phone if they have the chance.

insane_dreamer13• 2 years ago

It has nothing to do with poverty

Strong disagree.

If the gains are high enough, lots of people who aren't poor will steal.

But if the gains are low, then there's a risk-to-reward ratio that comes into play and, generally speaking, the poorer you are, the high ratio you're willing to put up with.

Rinzler893• 2 years ago

some people prioritizing money for themselves over the externalities

You mean exactly like the employees, execs and shareholders of the big publicly traded companies many people here work for?

But it's evil when the homeless crackhead in your neighborhood smashes your car window for drug money, but not the Google/Microsoft exec who pushes ads with malware or addictive drugs on your kids for a career advancement and a nice house in California, that's just called innovation, where the former person is the looser and the latter the winner of our capitalist system.

Many profitable industries have been built on privatizing the profits and socializing the externalities on the environment, society, people, etc. Oil & gas, mining, motor vehicles, fast fashion, ads, gambling, food, pharma, etc. Usually on less developed countries, and it only makes the news when those externalities finally reach us here in the rich western countries.

baggy_trough4• 2 years ago

The minimum wage makes it harder for the low skilled to find work.

petermcneeley• 2 years ago

Your comments seem to have a theme.

dinglestepup• 2 years ago

Huh? Minimum wage does not make it harder to find work.

Ferret74463• 2 years ago

It's not an insane amount of effort, and a lot of people are quite shameless.

I think your conclusion is wrong because you assume "huge risk/effort -> people only do this out of poverty" when it's "almost no risk/effort -> people want a quick hundred bucks".

InfiniteTitan• 2 years ago

I’ll never understand promoting the hysterical media driven vilification of crimes of poverty.

fshbbdssbbgdd2• 2 years ago

The costs of repairing the damage vastly exceed the earnings obtained by the criminal. The article gives the example $85k in damage incurred to repair damage that yielded $394 in scrap. This destruction of wealth harms overall welfare, and deprives the government of resources, which hurts poor people especially. In other words, even if you only care about people who live in poverty, you should support a crackdown that will deter crimes like this.

silverquiet3• 2 years ago

I wonder what the costs to prosecute a criminal are? I'm pretty cynical, so if I heard about $85K, I wouldn't be all that surprised.

monkmartinez4• 2 years ago

These are not crimes of poverty. These are crimes of people that literally don't give a f** about anyone but themselves and getting their next fix. Go ride along with your local PD or fire department to see the bulls** for yourself.

happytoexplain• 2 years ago

Even giving the benefit of the doubt that we can decide whether a thief was doing it to alleviate their poverty, it's still impossible to paint "poverty" theft as broadly sympathetic, since logically only a subset of thieves are making a sympathetic decision based on their personal circumstances. I.e. simply being poor doesn't mean you are stealing because you were forced into unfair circumstances and it's the only option you have left and your child is sick, etc.

Yes, Americans have a problem regarding crime perception - a lack of sympathy and a thirst for punishment. But your attitude is simply the opposite problem. Trying to use your broad paintbrush is only going to create antagonism. People understandably hate crime - hate. It ruins homes, businesses, communities, one's sense of safety and camaraderie - all of the things we work hardest for and hold dearest. It's too much to ask.

kiratp• 2 years ago

Its really grating to see headlines phrased this way, implying extreme outcomes. To someone not living in a city, it paints an immediate picture of dystopia. It pushes the rural-city divide further - the last thing we need more of.

glzone1• 2 years ago

"social malaise lingering since the pandemic and soaring demand for metals, especially for copper, has brought this street crime to new levels."

It's interesting that absolutely no mention of changes to policing / prosecution.

Across Los Angeles County, more than 290 fire hydrants have gone missing since January.

In my town we are having electric outages because of this (they call it "vandalism")

"Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez joined Hernandez in opposing the motions, even though he had initially supported the idea. He asked his colleagues to understand that the thefts might be committed by people living in poverty who are pushed into acts of desperation."

A note that the costs to report, schedule, supply, staff and roll a govt truck to do a fire hydrant or street light are not cheap. The poor person will get some money from wiring, but the city will be spending 10x - 100x that to get the infrastructure fixed up - so not sure allowing theft as a result of the pandemic or poverty is the most efficient way to address poverty? Insulated coper wire is about $1.50 per pound to recycle at a metal buyer.

frankus• 2 years ago

What makes the multiplier even more wild is when you consider the proceeds are probably being used (by the front-line thieves) to buy drugs whose cost is something like 10x–100x higher than the cost of production.

Many (including me) would consider it unethical but I understand the temptation to cut out several layers of middlemen and just have the government hand out drugs.

erulabs2• 2 years ago

You can say “just sort out who is doing this!” and you can say “what has happened to the world that it’s come to this!” And the answer to both is the same:

Drugs.

You’re stealing copper wiring because you’re an addict. You’re not getting a minimum wage job because you’re an addict. You live in poverty because you’re an addict.

Comments lamenting the state of society are as useful as kicking dirt. Either build better bridges or make better medicine.

Now one of you smart people comment something useful in this thread about tech that can cure dependency issues!

Cthulhu_3• 2 years ago

People live in poverty without being an addict; it's not an either/or, and you're punching down on both poor people and addicts, neither of which is helpful.

Tech will not cure dependency issues, it's biochemists, biologists, and psychologists that are at the forefront of that, and there isn't a universal cure for addiction. Tech also won't solve poverty, which is a political issue.

toomuchtodo• 2 years ago

Cheap access to GLP-1 agonists might help with addiction. I have facilitated someone getting access for alcoholism, and it’s like night and day, with them being fully functional.

Appears to be an incredibly powerful force multiplier, just need to scale up (can be manufactured for less than $5/month/person). My apologies for going off topic, confirming your point to solve addiction to solve these second order effects of mental health challenges and poverty. Secure (basic needs), functional humans with basic needs met don't strip infra and homes for copper.

Tech will not cure dependency issues, it's biochemists, biologists, and psychologists that are at the forefront of that, and there isn't a universal cure for addiction. Tech also won't solve poverty, which is a political issue.

Preach.

https://recursiveadaptation.com/p/wegovy-and-ozempic-semaglu...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40565144

https://recursiveadaptation.com/p/the-growing-scientific-cas...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-48780-6

monkmartinez4• 2 years ago

People live in poverty without being an addict

Please let me know where these people are! I have been riding the streets for 18 years in a city with over 1 million (Top 100 by population in the US) and I haven't met an actual impoverished person that was not an addict. Our "poorest" citizens eat better than lower middle-class with EBT. They steal because its 1000% easier than any job on the planet.

erulabs2• 2 years ago

Several issues:

1. Of course you can live in poverty without being an addict, that wasn't an implication of what I said.

2. Biochemistry is technology.

3. Tech will, has, and is 'solving' poverty.

4. My point is that it is not poverty driving people to strip copper from the walls, it is drug addiction.

xeromal• 2 years ago

Poor people aren't stealing copper. Crackheads are.

Teever• 2 years ago

There are a lot of people who steal stuff who aren't addicted.

It's a quick and easy way to make money, so of course drug addicts will be drawn to it, but people who don't care about the moral issues with stealing, or find it easier than the alternative will do it too.

imbusy111• 2 years ago

Drugs are mostly a side-effect of other psychological issues, and it's in a control theory sense a positive feedback loop. You can't eliminate drugs, but you can work on the underlying problems.

robocat• 2 years ago

Citation?

Anecdotally the people I know that take serious drugs are on average as normal as anyone else. And I know plenty of people with psych issues that don't take drugs. Neither a necessary nor sufficient condition.

Yes, we can work on people's underlying psychological problems, but we are far from having reliable solutions to resolve psychological problems.

Your implied solution is that we can fix drug addicts. That is a long way from reality in my limited experience (and I have acquantances working in drug rehab).

Watch one close friend go down the hellhole of drug addiction, and you can quckly discover for yourself that often (a) it isn't due to mental health and (b) there doesn't seem to be much that anyone can do.

henjodottech• 2 years ago

We’re working on a startup for non-addictive pain treatment. Derived from new genetics (not papaver somniferum).

mattlondon• 2 years ago

Get them hooked on social media before they get hooked on drugs.

But seriously, just regulate the recyclers where people are eventually taking this stuff.

legitster6• 2 years ago

A lot of this goes back to 2016 when states signed the Opioid compact that made it much harder to get Oxycontin prescriptions.

There were a lot of addicts that were getting opioids prescribed to them by a doctor and paid for by Medicaid. Abuse was happening but few needed to turn to crime.

Suddenly a lot of them lost their legal opioid prescription, and this is when we saw the explosion of fentanyl and the rise of drug fueled crime.

legitster6• 2 years ago

But the combination of the economic ills and social malaise lingering since the pandemic and soaring demand for metals, especially for copper, has brought this street crime to new levels.

Hmmm. There's something missing from this explanation.

While I don't think these reasons are wrong, we are being gaslit about some of the knock-on effects of our sudden cultural attitude towards our justice system that happened at this time.

Young people don't want to become police anymore and police don't want to police anymore.

monkmartinez4• 2 years ago

Young people don't want to become police anymore and police don't want to police anymore.

For good reasons too! It F**ing sucks dealing with ALL the problems of a city. Ask me how I know!

None of us, first responders, are allowed/empowered to do our damn jobs. We have been effectively neutered by woke activists that think everyone is out to get them. All hell breaks loose when you ask, demand or otherwise force people to take responsibility for themselves and/or own their mistakes.

BadHumans3• 2 years ago

Blaming the "woke" people and not corrupt police officers that indiscriminately murder people or the system that protects them is pretty telling.

Cthulhu_3• 2 years ago

All hell breaks loose when you ask, demand or otherwise force people to take responsibility for themselves and/or own their mistakes.

But if you're police or some other first response, your job is literally to take responsibility for other people?

insane_dreamer13• 2 years ago

Maybe if so many people who have been granted significant authority over others, aka "police", hadn't abused their power over a long period of time, to the point of causing significant harm, including death, of presumed innocent people, those "woke activists" wouldn't be calling for limits on those powers.

DEADMEAT• 2 years ago

Could you explain more about how first responders are not empowered at their jobs? I'm mostly curious if you see the cause as something local, or more like national policy that changes your ability to do your job.

muststopmyths• 2 years ago

All hell breaks loose when you ask, demand or otherwise force people to take responsibility for themselves and/or own their mistakes.

Said without any irony whatsoever

iamacyborg• 2 years ago

We have been effectively neutered by woke activists that think everyone is out to get them

Do you actually believe that or do you think there are perhaps broader issues at play?

legitster6• 2 years ago

Believe me, I see it from both sides. We need police who are empowered to do their own jobs.

However...

All hell breaks loose when you ask, demand or otherwise force people to take responsibility for themselves and/or own their mistakes.

The irony of this statement is that the entire collapse of trust with police in America was refusal for departments or unions to hold individual bad actors responsible. The reactionary response of police unions and the whole "thin blue line/sheepdog" attitude made it clear that also police don't want to take responsibility for mistakes.

octopoc2• 2 years ago

These woke activists go by the term "community organizers," which is especially ironic considering how dysfunctional they make communities. Multicultural societies are easy prey for them.

486sx332• 2 years ago

Exactly.

lotsofpulp3• 2 years ago

Speaking of people not taking responsibility:

https://www.divestspd.com/p/no-discipline-for-detective-arre...

The OPA could not sustain any allegations against Belgarde because the four-year deadline for discipline established in the police guild contract had passed.

When police unions decide to protect the bad ones, it obviously reduces their credibility and hence society’s trust in them. Might have worked for decades in the past due to lack of information, but people know this stuff now.

yard2010• 2 years ago

I always find it amusing that everyone hates the police but no one hates the firefighters. They both save people lives, yet some are bastards and some are heroes.

Cthulhu_3• 2 years ago

You seem to make the point that the problem will be solved with more police, even though part of the cultural attitude you mention vs police has been a direct response to the militarization and brutality, yet at the same time indifference of the police force. The BLM movement was triggered by police brutality, but your take is that we need more and more active police?

DeRock• 2 years ago

I don't know where you got the argument for "more police", but the direct quote from the GP:

police don't want to police anymore

Seems to contradict that being an argument.

legitster6• 2 years ago

It was always a false dichotomy.

The core issue was America needing better and more accountable policing.

"Defunding" the police was an extremist, fringe position that hijacked the situation.

insane_dreamer13• 2 years ago

Part of the original problem was too many of the wrong kind of people becoming -- or remaining -- police in the first place.

For example, we go through great lengths to ensure that doctors are suited to their job. Why? Because they have the power to kill people with their mistakes or poor judgement.

It's reasonable to apply that same high bar to police, who have much greater latitude in exercising that power, up to and including the power to kill their fellow citizens, than doctors do.

I don't think any young person who likes the idea of being able to walk around with a gun on their hip, being a police officer, anymore than I think any young person who likes cutting people open should become a surgeon.

legitster6• 2 years ago

The solution needs to be some sort of "Teach for America" equivalent for police where non-traditional, college-bound candidates receive funding to be placed in under-served communities.

gmd632• 2 years ago

The original problem is that news consumers and police spend the majority of their time scrutinizing the smallest and most radically terrible segments of each other's populations

wakawaka287• 2 years ago

Part of the original problem was too many of the wrong kind of people becoming -- or remaining -- police in the first place.

There are always going to be some bad actors in any profession. Being violent to an appropriate extent is part of being a cop. When billionaires fund social media psyops to convince people that their friendly neighborhood cops are out to get them, and they'd be better off without police protection, that distorts public perception of police performance.

Perceived problems with police need to be investigated carefully. Stirring the public into a frenzy every time some cop looks bad on video is harmful to everyone.

It's reasonable to apply that same high bar to police, who have much greater latitude in exercising that power, up to and including the power to kill their fellow citizens, than doctors do.

No, it's not reasonable to expect police to go through a similar amount of rigor as a doctor. The job just isn't that complex, and there is nothing inherent about possibly killing people that requires a comparable amount of training. If being a cop did require such rigors, we couldn't afford to have police at all.

I don't think any young person who likes the idea of being able to walk around with a gun on their hip, being a police officer, anymore than I think any young person who likes cutting people open should become a surgeon.

There's nothing wrong with walking around with a gun on your hip, whether you're a cop or not. I get what you're trying to say but there's only so much anyone can do to discern anyone's internal motivations for picking a career. As long as those motivations aren't evil or likely to interfere with their job performance, I don't care.

kristianp• 2 years ago

I agree that the article is ascribing some meaning to the crimes that doesn't exist. It is simply that the offenders found out about this method of making money. Even though it's a pittance. Perhaps a better theory is simply lack of social safety net.

DaoVeles• 2 years ago

It is things like this that make me occasionally think we are in the modern version of the library of Alexandria.

We have the peak of technology and knowledge and yet the core base of the society is rotting away, alas we know how it ended last time. Perhaps we to go the way of the neoplatonists?

asdff3• 2 years ago

When has the core base of society ever not been rotten? I think what is changing now is that people went from a few happy go lucky decades of being flabbergasted that anything bad can happen, to the media pendulum swinging the other way of showing us the ugly truth too much and assuming things happen even more often than they truly do, at least in terms of your real personal odds of risk.

_fat_santa• 2 years ago

Looking at crime in general around cities and not just metal theft, I think that it's the result of a mismatch of incentives and disincentives.

If you are in poverty in America and want to get help, it's pretty easy to get. You can get food stamps to buy food, to go a shelter or section 8 for housing, we have welfare and many other programs to take care of folks who ask for it.

But each of those programs has rules, you can't buy booze with your food stamps and you can't bring drugs into a shelter for example. Some people don't like this tradeoff so they resort to theft, whether breaking into a car or stealing the copper wiring out of a lightpole.

And that is where the issue is, while we are pouring tons and tons of resources into the inventive, we as a society are neglecting the fact that you also need disincentives. We need to make sure that we show people that we have incentives to get them back on their feet, get them healthy and get them fed but we also need to show equal disincentives if they choose to break the law.

joe_the_user• 2 years ago

If you are in poverty in America and want to get help, it's pretty easy to get.

No, you're wrong. The only thing one can say is "many programs exist" but they are altogether inadequate even without their restrictions (which you're minimizing).

Most places section 8 housing is nearly impossible to get with years waits common. Shelters have extremely restrictive conditions as well as being very unpleasant (being around people destroyed by the system isn't good for even those not yet in terrible condition).

Also, drugs and alcohol are often by homeless people to get to sleep in circumstances where it would be otherwise impossible.

CobrastanJorji2• 2 years ago

I'm not sure "pretty easy" is fair. In my city, there's a lottery for Section 8 housing. The applications are regularly closed. I think our applications might've been closed since 2020 (https://www.kcha.org/housing/vouchers/lottery). The people who got on that list before 2020 are periodically chosen in a lottery when vouchers occasionally become available. Once they have the voucher, they are then responsible for finding a landlord that accepts Section 8 housing vouchers and has an availability.

That's not to say that there aren't many options for aid, but many of these programs are much less available than you'd think.

monkmartinez4• 2 years ago

Let me ask you a question; Why doesn't Singapore deal with this type of crime?

We, as a society, have stopped demanding people to take responsibility for themselves. We don't hold anyone accountable for their actions. We ostracize the basic enforcement of accountability and those that are charged with upholding law. We are soft AF as a society.

CobrastanJorji2• 2 years ago

Don't like 3/4 of Singaporeans live in some form of subsidized public housing? I would definitely support heavily funding the same solution here, if that's what you're advocating.

archagon• 2 years ago

Hell, you could stop crime altogether if every misdemeanor carried the death penalty!

soperj• 2 years ago

Sackler family is likely the most responsible for this.

Severian• 2 years ago

Prosecute the scrap metal yards more harshly, have a "police book" like used car lots and pawn shops. Document the person selling, get a photo of the same with the persons face, etc, etc.

Only allow maximum amounts of metal to be recycled unless said person has a registered business, per day/week/whatever. Regulate it.

There isn't an incentive if you can't sell it. As a commentator indicated below people were scrapping fire hydrants. Wouldn't this be a huge red flag??

"Oh yeah, I see you have 5 hydrants here to sell. I can't think of where these could have possibly have come from."

h2odragon• 2 years ago

quick look at my usual place shows them paying $0.15/lb for clean lead, 3cents less for batteries; and up to $2.20lb for clean copper.

At the peak in 2007, lead was worth at least 1/3rd more.

https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lead

... so i dunno about "soaring demand for metals", cuz the market doesn't seem to show that.

copper is higher than the 2011 peak, but not that much more.

https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/copper

mythrwy3• 2 years ago

I replace my HVAC system last month. I did it myself (yes, this can be done with some research!).

I took the old one to a metal scrap yard, inside unit and outside. They made me go back home and cut some stuff apart for "top dollar" (which wasn't worth it really but I did it anyway).

Very surprised at what I received. I had over 200 pounds of "tin" (they called it) which was basically scrap steel. That fetched around $10 at $.04 a pound. The aluminum radiators fetched $.37 a pound coming to nearly $20. The old copper refrigerant lines however fetched around $3.50 a pound (nearly $60) and they were a small part of the whole system weight-wise, but most of the money. The owner got visibly excited when he saw the copper lines so I assume it's pretty profitable on that end too.

Overall I got close to $100 which wasn't worth the work, but it needed to be disposed of anyway. It was also "interesting" as I'd never been in a scrap yard before. Lots of shady looking folks coming in (some on bicycles) while I was there.

The disparity in metals pricing was surprising, with copper being worth more and aluminum way less then I'd thought. Also interesting was it was pretty close to a 10X ratio for each metal. Copper = 10X aluminum. Aluminum = 10X steel.

TacticalCoder• 2 years ago

Copper theft is totally a thing in Europe too, in many countries.

First country I find by googling is Germany but copper thieves are stealing cables alongside railroad in France, Belgium, etc.

https://www.recyclingtoday.com/news/copper-railway-theft-eur...

And it is regularly disrupting trains.

These thieves do not care for the community. They do care about fake Luis Vuitton caps (convinced they're highly stylish with their Luis Vuitton caps and Luis Vuitton manpurses) and the latest iPhone though.

reader_x• 2 years ago

Last month while cleaning out a relative’s house, I made my first trip to a metal scrap yard. I had fishing weights (lead), old copper pipes, rolls of electrical wire, broken aluminum chairs - and street signs. I assumed the scrap yard would reject the street sign since, if they would accept it, why wouldn’t people steal them routinely? To my surprise they accepted everything, asked no questions nor asked for ID, and paid cash. The incentives here are clear. Maybe it’s the point of sale that needs closer scrutiny since police can’t guard all the light poles 24/7.

Server6• 2 years ago

Most scrap yards are run by shady goons who don't care enough to enforce the rules.

banish-m4• 2 years ago

It's roughly similar to what happened after the fall of the Soviet Union. Power lines were routinely stolen for scrap.

When there is massive inequality (or rampant drug abuse) and inadequate law enforcement, people on the fringes cannibalize essential infrastructure and sacred spaces. Meanwhile, the very rich take advantage of the situation to gain more power and benefits.

Metal thieves in America's cities

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