If you are in a trade that generates offcuts, you are in one of two situations. Either someone is paying you for them, or you are paying someone to take them away. There is rarely a middle.
What each trade is sitting on
Electricians
Cable offcuts are the obvious one and they add up faster than anyone expects on a rewire. Beyond that: old switchboards and meter boxes with copper bus bar in them, transformers, and the motors out of anything you have replaced.
Plumbers
Brass is the money. Taps, valves, fittings and old tapware out of bathroom strip-outs. Then copper pipe, old hot water systems, and the brass out of irrigation work.
Air conditioning and refrigeration
Old outdoor units on every changeover, compressors, and copper line sets. The units are already degassed as part of the job, so the hard part is done before they reach the ute.
Builders and demolition
Mixed, high volume, and usually the biggest loads. Steel, copper out of the walls, old fixtures, roofing. A site clean-up is worth a conversation before a skip gets ordered.
Mechanics
Radiators, batteries, alloy wheels, alternators and starters, and general steel. Radiators in particular, because the copper and brass ones are worth real money and get binned constantly.
The maths over a year
Work out your own, it only takes a minute. Take what you currently spend on tip fees or skips for metal waste. Add what that material would have paid at scrap rates. The difference is the swing, and it is the number worth knowing.
For a busy sparkie or plumber it is usually a few thousand dollars a year of swing, which is a decent chunk of a van payment for doing nothing except keeping a bin separate.
How a standing pickup works
- Tell us roughly what you generate and how fast it builds up.
- We agree a frequency, weekly, fortnightly or on call.
- We come to the yard or the site. You do not load.
- Weighed in front of you and paid on the spot each time.
- If a big job lands, ring and we will come out of cycle.
Setting it up on site
Three labelled bins or bulka bags. Copper, brass, everything else. That is the whole system and it is the difference between a sorted load and a blended rate.
Tell the apprentices what goes where once and it runs itself. The sorting is what makes the standing pickup worth having rather than just convenient.