Scrap Metal Is A Booming Business!
Scrap metal is also known under the term of waste metal. This describes a range of products made from various metals that either ended their useful life, or have been damaged and made useless. Scrap metal used to belong to those dirty, noisy scrap yards, where low paid workers were dismantling wrecks of old cars, washing machines, and hot water heaters. Then there are scrap docks where old ships are cut to pieces, and different metals and their alloys are segregated, and sent to a foundry, for recycling. You won’t see many of them in the USA, but India and South Korea are world renowned leaders in ship scrapping.
Amongst many scrap metals being recycled today, precious metals like gold, platinum, silver, rhodium and titanium are commercially the most important ones.
Most of them form parts of electronic equipment, with an average desktop containing all these metals, plus mercury, rhenium, strontium, etc. Not to mention large amounts of copper and tin. This situation resulted in the onset of highly specialized technologies and then an industry, recycling nothing but scrap metal from appliances and electronics.
The stakes are high; considering that just a minuscule dose of mercury can spoil the quality of gold recovered from electric contacts and microprocessors, rendering the waste useless.
Then there’s a whole group of popular metals, like steel (iron), aluminum, lead and zinc.
The most common steel scrap contains many different forms of iron. Most of them, although varying by the carbon content, contain no other additives. Others, like stainless steel contains nickel and chromium. All these metals need to be segregated and compacted, in preparation for the foundry where they’ll be melted together with their “raw” equivalents. Although the process of metal recycling consumes large amounts of energy, it’s still less than when producing it from its ore.
It was quite a common practice to send scrap metal from industrialized nations to the less developed ones, for processing. Mainly, because of the stigma associated with the recycling industry, as being dirty and polluting the environment. Nowadays though, scrap metal is collected in the bins provided by the processor, and recycled in a close location. This minimizes the cost of transportation and increases the competitive edge of the waste operator.
Although the common perception is that scrap metals are hard to recover and made any use of, the exact opposite is true. If harvested correctly (no contaminants are allowed to enter the process), waste metals present technologically a very sound opportunity to obtain high purity metals. All this, for a fraction of the cost of producing metals through the normal stages; beginning with mining the ore, etc.
As market prices of all raw materials grow substantially, more and more recycling takes place, as a financially viable alternative. Consequently, the price of scrap metal goes up, and the wastage is reduced through better methods of collection and recovery. From the environment protection's perspective, an added bonus. Federal and state governments provide various incentives for the industry at large, to get more involved in the scrap metal collecting and reclaiming. The response it receives is very favorable, and if the trend continues, in case of the more common metals, the newly made goods will contain up to 35% of the scrap metal. Certainly, a very encouraging result when considering limited availability of some resources on our planet. 
Scrap Gold
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