Scrap Copper Prices Today

There is no national scrap copper price. Every yard sets its own board each morning from the COMEX copper price, its freight and processing costs, and what the yard down the road is paying. That's why the same grade can differ by 30 or 40 cents between two cities on the same day.

The gap between the exchange and the board covers four real costs: sorting and processing labor, freight to a mill or refiner, the risk of the price dropping between the day the yard buys and the day it sells, and the yard's margin. The gap isn't fixed. It widens when copper falls fast, because the yard is protecting itself against a loss on metal it already owns, and tightens when mills are short of material. Cleaner, better-sorted copper needs less processing and keeps more of the benchmark, which is the whole logic behind the grades.

US yards grade copper against the recycling industry's ReMA specifications, which use code words: Barley is bare bright wire, Berry and Candy are No.1 wire and No.1 solids, Birch and Cliff are No.2. What matters at the scale is simpler than the names: bare bright is shiny, stripped, uncoated wire 16 gauge or thicker; No.1 is clean, unalloyed pipe, solids, and wire with no solder, paint, or heavy oxidation; No.2 is the same metal with solder joints, coatings, or corrosion; light copper is thin roofing and sheet, often with tar.

Grade boundaries are strict in the spec and applied with judgment at the scale. A bin of bright wire with a few painted pieces mixed in is usually bought entirely as the lower grade, which is why sorting is worth more than any other prep. Two things move copper down a grade more than anything else: solder and coatings. Cut the fittings off a run of pipe and it moves from No.2 to No.1, a difference of roughly $0.20 a pound at today's price.

Insulated wire is bought whole and priced on copper recovery, the share of the wire's weight that is copper once the jacket is off. THHN building wire runs about 75 to 85 percent copper and pays the most as-is; Romex house wire about 60 to 68 percent; appliance cords and car harnesses 40 to 50 percent. Stripped wire sells as bare bright.

Whether stripping pays is arithmetic. A pound of Romex at 65 percent recovery becomes about 0.65 pounds of bare bright worth $3.35 to $3.69, against $2.77 to $3.30 for the same pound sold with the jacket on. The gain is real but small per pound, so it pays with a hand-crank stripper and volume. Wire grades, recovery rates, and the full strip-or-sell math are on the insulated copper wire prices page.

Plumbing tear-outs are mostly No.2 as they come out of the wall, because every joint carries solder. Ten minutes with a tubing cutter removing the fittings turns most of the weight into No.1. Brass valves and fittings go in their own pile and sell as brass.

Roofing copper and old flashing carry tar and heavy oxidation and sell as light copper. Air-conditioner coils are copper tubing through aluminum fins and sell as ACR coil, clean once the steel end plates are cut off. Auto radiators with copper cores and brass tanks are their own grade. Water heaters and boilers give up a few pounds of copper pipe and brass fittings for a lot of steel, so weigh the time before tearing them down.