I deal with a company in Boise that hauls lumber on their flatbed maxi trucks. However, their main business is being a scrap yard. They haul crushed autos over to the coast/Portland and haul lumber and other commodities back to Boise on their flatbeds.
They recycle copper Romex wire. They have a machine that strips the casing off the wire, chops it up into 1/8” long pieces and blows it into cardboard bins up to 4000 pounds.
They load 16 bins on a flatbed and take it to some smelter over in OR. A full maxi flatbed is 64,000 pounds. They get about two loads a month.
They also recycle Catalytic converters and recently tires.
There is a lot of money in scrap.
I recall watching a YouTube video about an amateur chemist who theorized that if enough highway dust were collected, one might find useable amounts of platinum and palladium which had been shed by catalytic converters. He swept up a five-gallon bucket of dust from a nearby interstate and ran it through a series of complicated chemical reactions after which he did get at least a measurable amount of those precious metals.