Scrap Metal Etiquette

[digger242j]

This may not even be an issue for many of you--you may never dig any scrap metal up, or be on a job where there is any scrap left over from day to day operations, but for those who have an opinion about it, here's the question: Who owns it? Or more to the point, when does ownership rightly change hands to the person who ends up cashing it in?

What I'm talking about is those instances on the job when a machine digs up some old iron pipe, or the concrete contractor has a few hundred pounds of decking ends and pieces laying around, or the roofer has a mess of aluminum scraps from the gutters. That stuff has to end up somewhere, be it the landfill, or the scrap yard.

Does it belong to the general contractor? Does the dug up stuff belong to the operator? If you dig up a bunch of copper while renewing a water service line, does it belong to the plumber, or the excavator? There are hundreds of possible scenarios.

In another thread (http://www.heavyequipmentforums.com/Forum/showthread.php?t=154&highlight=scrap) I posted a picture of a big motor I dug up. I took it to the scrap yard and kept the proceeds. Would any of you have argued that you deserved a share?

This past week, one of the carpenters on the site, (who works for a different builder altogether), had and old metal garage door to get rid of. He pointed it out to one of my coworkers and said to tell me about it, because he'd seen me collecting scrap. I picked it up from in front of their dumpster, and carried it across the street to one of our lots, where I was going to load it up at quitting time. Around lunchtime, I happened to see one of our carpenters putting it in his truck. When I explained the circumstances--that the guy had specifically offered it to me, and that I'd put it where it was currently laying he graciously unloaded it and explained that he'd asked the job superintendant, and been told that it just appeared there, and he didn't care what happened to it. I felt just a little guilty about disappointing the carpenter--I could just about see those cold six-packs slipping through his fingers. Funniest part was, everybody, includuding the guy who'd dumped it thought it was aluminum, but it was steel. Maybe it was worth 2 bucks at the scrap yard, instead of the 15 it might have been.

A few years back, I had a mess of cast irn sitting in my backhoe bucket on a friday. Over the weekend, one of the laborers (who had nothing to do with any of the digging work), came in and took for himself. I didn't feel he had any right to do that.

Anybody have any thoughts to add?

[Steve Frazier]

Primary ownership would be the property owner in the eyes of the law.

My next comments are based on my feelings of what would be right. I think next in line would be whoever contracted the job, then if the excavator hadn't contracted the job, he would follow the contractor. If the operator wasn't the owner of the excavator, he'd be next in line. I think however that the property owner would be within his rights to give the scrap to whomever he chose.

[LaLaMan]

Who ever worked at pulling it out gets it.

Or the apprentice on the job (since their the lowest paid get it) union tradition

Or split it up with the crew, the guy who takes it down get a few more bucks for gas and mileage,

[BRL]

Been a long time since I was in this situation, but as I recall, what LaLaMan posted is how we did it too.

[MSC]

I have been there.
Was in the process of tearing down an old school to make room for a new senior center.
All utilities were underground, all copper wire, water service, and ground wires for the electric service, interior plumbing were also copper.
Had a crew of 3 guys and myself doing the job.
loaded it all in the truck one day and cashed it in.
We split it like this. Took proceeds split in half, took that half and saved it for coffee, bagels, whatever.
The other half, we split 4 ways and each man got his share.
This seemed to me to be the fairest way.
Rich

[KeppleServices]

Hey guys, new to this forum and ran across this thread. I do a lot of demolition mostly, and I specifically put in my bids and contracts that I have all rights to any and all scrap. I bid acordingly to that also. Example, I bid on demoing an old cellular switch. It was essentially a building inside of a building. The inner building was approx 1200 sq feet inside of a wharehouse, with a poured concrete mezanine that held 4 20 ton AC units to cool the electronic equipment. These units where also water cooled to the outside all with copper piping, some of which was 6"pipe! I scrapped out the AC units, pipe, wiring(LOTS of it), buss bars, ground bars, you name it. There was 2100 LBS of copper in the end. All of which was mine. It all depends in the end on how it is written from the begining. Demolition contractors regularly factor in the scrap value of the steel, copper, aluminum, etc in bids.

[Squizzy246B]

Hey Kepple, welcome to HEF.

[surfer-joe]

Unless, like KeppleServices, you have a written statement or contract as to whom owns, or whom is to take possession of what, the stuff legally belongs to the property owner. Unless it's hazardous waste of course, in which case it simply belongs to whoever put it there, if they can be found. Verbal agreements are OK if both parties agree and are knowledgeable about what is there and it's value. But this may not hold up in court in case of a dispute.

Welcome to the group KeppleServices, the more the merrier!

[cat320]

scap metal well the one who owns the property your doing the work on owns it. Just like dirt you dig up you charge to take it away because it's the owners. I know they when demo comes in at my brotherinlaws work the guys doing the the loader/excavator work inside the building keep what they find but by all rights it's the trash co,they get paid to haul it awayout of the tranfer station the guys in the machines.But usually unless it's alot most people don't bring it in for the $$ becuase there is not alot to be bothered. I even got some copper that a plumber threw out and there was alot too.

[digger242j]

When I posed the question originally, I was thinking more in terms of small quantities than large. I think there are a lot of situations where the amount of cash involved makes for nice pocket money for somebody, but would just be a nuisance to the contractor or site owner.

As I said above, there are hundreds of possible scnarios.

Here are a few I've run into, or am aware of.

I worked for a guy once that demo'ed the Castle Shannon Incline.(What the heck is an incline you ask?) (http://members.tripod.com/~riid/inclines.html) He told me he got enough copper out of there to make payroll for the entire job.

I did some grading for a landscaper. As it turned out, there was about 100 feet of abandoned 8" cast iron waterline that had to come out. The site owner just wanted the job done, and the landscaper didn't want to deal with it, so I got to keep the cast iron.

I did a grading job for another landscaper, at his own property, leveling an area next to his garage. He called around for some aggregate to spread on it, and the cheapest he found was some slag, called "9 AS". It was waste from an "electric furnace" steel mill. Slag, firebricks, etc. When the trucks started dumping though, it made a strange tinkling, clinking, sound. It had lots of small scraps of stainless steel mixed in with it! I asked, and the customer said he didn't care if I recovered the scrap. I made almost as much at the scrap yard as I did doing the job.

The garage door I mentioned above, turned out not to be aluminum, as I'd hoped, but steel. Big disappointment there. But one of the laborers at the scrap yard took it home with him and built a garage around it.

And in the only notable case of the owner wanting to keep the proceeds of the scrap (stupid us for asking him :Pointhead ), last summer, we repaired a parking lot that had settled about a foot, right in the middle. It was me digging, working with his truck and driver and a couple of laborers. It was a case of the demo contractor having screwed the owner, and essentially having left most of the house inside the basement, and just covering it with a couple feet of dirt. We dug into it, and found (among other things), a large, heavy cast iron furnace. Since we were only a couple blocks from the nearest scrap yard, I tossed it into the truck, and he came back with $65. The driver asked me what we should do. Being (sort of) honest, but expecting the owner to not care too much, I suggested he simply ask whether he should take that money to the office, or what? (I was thinking he'd say we could buy lunch with it or something.) When he found out that it brought $65 he kept it. :( (And didn't even offer to buy lunch for us himself.)

And the biggest money, long term, scrap etiquette deal of which I am aware...

I know a guy that used to work at the slag dump, back when they actually made steel here in Pittsburgh. He told me that they'd get loads that had some sort of big copper components in them. They were something from the blast furnaces, and weighed about 40 pounds each. He and another 3 or 4 guys there at the dump would pick them out, and scrap them. Every couple of years, they'd each buy a new car. One day a guy from the mill came by, and saw a pile of those copper things sitting there, and asked about them. Whoever answered just said something like, "Uhh, we just found them in the slag." In their next pay envelope, they got a nice thank you letter from the mill, and a $100 bonus. But they never saw another one of those copper things... :(

[surfer-joe]

When I first went to college back in 1970 in Northern Michigan, it was in an area where there had been many copper and silver mines back in the mid 1800's. My roommate and a couple of buddies and I used to take off from the dorm on weekends to explore the area and visit these old mines. Never knew what you could pick up you know.

We were wandering around one abandoned mine picking up the stray little bit of native copper when a big new Cadillac pulled in, and we all said, "oh, oh!" We thought we were busted.

The chauffer got out and opened up the back door for his passenger, a little stooped over white-haired guy who promptly walked over to us and asked "if we were finding any silver." "We hadn't," we told him, "and furthermore, that was the first we'd heard about any silver being there in the area."

The little guy chuckled and said, "oh yes, there was a lot of silver in this mine. When he was a young boy he worked there and his job was to check the muck conveyor coming out of the mine for debris. He was supposed to grab that stuff and throw it off to the side so it wouldn't go into the crusher and plug it up with wood and clay."

But he also "hi-graded pocketfuls of silver -- which was in the clay -- every day and took it home." "He had," he declared, "invested the silver wisely and had owned several large manufacturing businesses in Detroit for many years untill he retired and sold them off. He owed it all to a year of working at this mine."

We stood around and talked for quite a while as he pointed out where things had been located and he also told us of how miserable things could get during inclement weather and especially winter. He mentioned that the mine never shut down, not even for Christmas. The mine operated till the easily recoverable copper ran out he told us, but he was long gone by then. He thought there was still plenty more copper and silver there, but like all mines in the area, it was a very wet one and had to have huge steam-engine driven pumps running constantly to keep the water back.

He was nearly a hundred years old he told us, and wanted to see his home country one more time, didn't figure he would make the trip again. He thanked us for being there to tell his story to.

I've never forgotten that old Finlander. Try as we might, we never did find any silver in the waste dump there, lots of copper, but no silver.

[Countryboy]

At the quarry the rail track that we have is ours, meaning we are responsible for the maintanence. We have an outside contractor come out to replace broken rails, switches and cleaning.

Over the years we developed a stockpile of old worn out rail that nobody wanted to handle because of the paperwork involved. The local scrapyard wants documentation that the rails are actually privately owned and are not the railroads property.

It seems everybody that asked about this thought it to be a big headache and wanted nothing to do with it. To bad for them........

One of my co-workers and I looked at the pile and saw money to be made. We asked around and found the same info that everybody else had found.....looked like a big headache. So I went to the scrap yard and inquired about the procedure to turn in old rail road equipment and was in for a nice surprise.

Turns out that all we needed was a notarised letter (1 piece of paper to be exact) from my company stating that the rail was ours and not the rail roads. CHA-CHING!!! So we go to the quarry manager and ask for the letter to which he gladly types up. Turns out he wanted the rail gone too but couldn't find anyone that wanted to handle it. We worked a deal that we would remove the rail in exchange for the all the profits. He even let us used a company welding truck so we would have something to cut the rail with. The only stipulation was that it had to be done on our time. No big deal though, we had just struck a gold mine.

We used a loader to lay all the rails out (50 ft long each) and spaced them a couple feet apart so we had room to work. We had spoken to the scrap yard and found that anything 4 ft and under would bring a certain price and anything 4 ft and over would bring half that price due to the extra handling involved to minimize the metal.

I went out the next day and bought a tandem 7,000 lb trailer to haul the metal. Little did that trailer know, it was about to have to earn its keep.....big time. We dicided that we would use his truck and my trailer to get the metal to the yard and would split the earnings 50/50.

We cut and cut for 3 weeks and had barely made it through half the pile. He worked days and I worked nights so we had about 8 hours between us that was spent cutting metal. We were averaging 3 loads perday or $1,500 each day total.

Well it never fails that when things are going good, something is going to happen to ruin it........

Another guy we worked with saw that we were making huge amounts of money rather easily. After all, we cut the metal, loaded it and hauled it to the yard........piece of cake. He went to the manager and complained that it was not fair to him because he didn't know how to use a torch so he was unable to make any money :beatsme . What that has to do with me I will never know cause I didn't know how to use a torch either but you tend to learn pretty quick with the correct motivation :naughty.

So he makes a big stink about it and our little side "business" is shut down indefinately. Instead of trying to learn something and help out he just had to ruin it for us because he was too lazy to get off his rear. It wasn't about him making money, it was the fact that we were making money and he couldn't have any without helping us :mad:.

We had half the pile left when we had to stop but the manager figured out how easy it was and found a company to haul it off in one load. Doesn't really matter though cause we made a chunk of change off the other half, all because I wasn't afraid to keep asking questions....:cool:

[thejdman04]

If you ask, or someone asks you, then go for it (assuming the person who asks if you want it has the authority to be giving it away. I see "corner stone construction product reclaimers" put bins up in new residences that you can throw anything in, wood aluminum steel etc. I know a lot of guys who to me steal out of those bins. Once the contractor "owner" throws a piece of tin in one of those bins, for that company to come pick up, to me now that other company owns it.

[digger242j]

I see "corner stone construction product reclaimers" put bins up in new residences that you can throw anything in, wood aluminum steel etc. I know a lot of guys who to me steal out of those bins. Once the contractor "owner" throws a piece of tin in one of those bins, for that company to come pick up, to me now that other company owns it.

Hmm...I never heard of that. :confused: I'd agree that once there's an agreement between that company and the project's owner, you'd be wrong to go dumpster diving without permission. However, if the owner were to give you permission, before he called to have that dumpster removed...

I have no qualms about salvaging anything that goes into the dumpsters on one of the sites I work on. They go to the landfill, and I've been told that there, a guy can be fired for even picking one thing out of the trash, and they have video monitors watching them too. I've long harbored a secret ambition to actually build a house out of the perfectly serviceable stuff that gets thrown away... :)

[Countryboy]

I've long harbored a secret ambition to actually build a house out of the perfectly serviceable stuff that gets thrown away... :)

I just threw out a old pair of socks with holes in the toes....the rest of the sock is perfectly functional. You want me to ship um to ya....:confused: :D

[digger242j]

I just threw out a old pair of socks with holes in the toes....the rest of the sock is perfectly functional. You want me to ship um to ya....:confused: :D

No thanks. I haven't found any serviceable sock toes to make them complete. Hang on to them, and if I can find some toes, I'll let you know...

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