I recently lost my business so I decided to start a junk hauling and scrap recycling business. It's only been two weeks since I started advertising and I haven't really picked up any jobs hauling junk so I've taken to going out on bulk night and picking up anything with metal in it. After 3 nights out working I thought I had a sizable sum of metal so I took a day, tested to determine whether ferrous or non ferrous, and sorted and broke everything down so it would fit in my pickup. As for the ferrous items it was mostly items like bed frames, shelving, assorted pieces of sheet metal, poles from a few soccer nets and basketball hoops and various flimsy pieces of metal I was able to grab from the roadside. For the non ferrous items I had aluminum sinks, some bats, lawn chairs, and some used sterno casings. I also picked up like a dozen lighting ballasts, some thin gauge copper wire, a small piece of brass pipe, and about two dozen light bulb sockets with the copper backing( I haven't scrapped these because I didn't have time to remove the copper and I'd bet all of it would barely amount to a pound). Anyway, I totaled in at 450 pounds of the ferrous stuff at .08 cents a pound, 42 pounds of aluminum at .50 cents a pound. 3 pounds of electrical wire at 1.40 a pound, 20 pounds of ballasts(listed on the invoice as c.b.m) at .18 cents a pound and 2 pounds of brass at 1.60 a pound. Do these numbers seem fair? The guy at the scrap yard seemed very cool and I don't know enough yet to be able to haggle and nothing annoys people more than a guy who argues over things he barely understands so I just took the price he offered. Aside from the prices I got I'm basically trying to figure out if you guys bother with bulk night and picking up ferrous metal in small quantities like that. As it is I made 68 bucks for driving around for a total of 15 hours or so and then spending another 6-7 hours breaking up the items and loading and unloading my truck so with gas prices and without even counting my labor I basically lost money. I know I have to figure out better ways to find the good metals, but the fact that I see steady crews of guys doing what I just did on a regular basis tells me I either did something wrong or I got cheated( I don't think this is the case) Anyway, thanks for taking the time to read this and any advice you could give me would be much appreciated.