There's cash in those old cars in the creek
Posted
Jul 11 2008, 01:05 PM
by
Karen Datko
You don't have to travel to Eastern Kentucky to find rusting carcasses of cars and appliances that were pushed over the hill or into the creek. People who disrespect the land abound wherever you go.
But that area of the country (and, we suspect, many others) is inadvertently undergoing beautification because scrap metal now commands pretty prices, a newspaper story says. People are finding there's much cash to be made from the junk in them thar hills.
An article in the Lexington Herald-Leader documents the trend: The price of finished scrap metal was $520 per ton in May, more than five times higher than it was five years ago. Give the credit to developing countries like China and India, which are importing massive amounts of U.S. scrap iron and steel.
The article says scrap yard owner Daniel Cordle "pays sellers $180 per ton of steel. (Five years ago, he paid about $20 a ton.) A discarded pickup truck weighs more than 11/2 tons, or about $300 for a junked truck."
The offshoot is that junk that never made it to the landfill is putting extra money in people's hands. That's fortuitous when other rising prices are nothing but a drain. The article says:
In fact, scrap has gone from a nuisance "everybody had" in their backyards to a commodity, said Robert Sallie of Lee City in Wolf County. "I've been doing this all my life," said Sallie, while dropping off a tremendous pile of scrap at Mr Metal for which he received $1,014. "It's getting really hard to find now."
