Intro & am I getting ripped off?

Hi! Call me Egg. I live in Las Vegas NV USA.

Little background... In my career I was an electrician. The boss let me keep scrap wire, and when I had a heap I would take it to the yard and take whatever they gave me - woo! Free money!

Now I'm mostly retired, and I'm trying a little scrapping to make some "walking around money". Very, very small scale. Mostly, I take appliances and electronics out of the dumpsters at my condo (amazing what people throw out!) and gut them for copper and aluminum - frankly, steel ain't worth my time and effort.

So now that I'm actually in it for the money, I've started to pay attention to pricing, and here's where it gets weird. None of the yards in Las Vegas post prices online, but yards elsewhere in America do. So I'll look at some random yard in Baltimore or wherever and see they're paying.

So today I'm looking at pricing of 6061 aluminum extrusion. I have a huge bucket of heat sinks on hand. I can see yards nationwide are paying $0.50-$0.65 lb. Great! Then I call my local yards and they're offering $0.25-$0.27 per lb.

So can one of you fine folks tell me what gives? Is it because I'm on a small scale? Is it because all the yards in Vegas just underpay?

I'm really questioning if this is worth my effort in this town.

Oh, and thanks for having me!

Ok New guy. (I'm not calling you Egg.)
You get what you get when you turn in your scrap. You always can mail it to people of this forum. At a quick glance I seen AL heat sinks going for .70 but you have to pay shipping.
Be happy there's a place to even pays you for scrap. I got paid .75 for 2 truck loads of computer towers, and I was happy because he took my printers. Normally I just give them to him for free but I think he was testing me to see if I would even take .75 or I would be like I don't want that. Anyway you can call around to get prices too. Hope this helps.
P.s. I will pick pennies off the ground when I see them.

We've got a couple of members in the LV area. The impression i got from them is that scrapyard prices your area are lower than average. It's the winter season too.You might hold your stuff for awhile and see if prices go back up in the spring.

All around though .... different jobs pay differently. A Master tradesman might make more in a day than a scrapper clears in a week -or- a month. You have to decide for yourself if the juice is worth the squeeze or not.

So here in LV go to Desert Recycling or Champion recycling. Their prices are usually the best followed by Top Dollar and Nevada with the S&A yards pretty far behind them. Prices here are a little low in general and it's hard to find places to scrap some items at all. But when you find electronics and computets save the circuit boards and I'll buy them from you! I pay nearly double what anyone else in the valley does!

Originally Posted by hobo finds

Sometimes a yard that has a metal shredder pays a little better for scrap as they need items to feed the shredder. How much are you getting for aluminum cans in Vegas?

.45-.50 depending on the yard. But other folks around town buy them from you for $1.

Also hi and welcome to the forum!