“Recyclers pay you for iron and steel too (not cans but engines and cars).”
Took a mid-sized dead lawn tractor to the recycle place. $11. That’s all!
The last steel I sold recently was about 0.5 cents/lb.
Means your lawn tractor probably weighed around 400 lb. The price of new materials would be around $100. So that $89 gap must be larger than the sorting, transport, cutting, melting costs to make it profitable. Anyway its a 9:1 ratio. Aluminum has a much tighter ratio, around 2:1. But they both pay out money...because of authentic market drivers. Btw, steel and iron have dropped like a rock, ever since China decided to quit building empty cities. In 2007 you would have been paid $60 for that old mower.
Assuming they paid a fair price, and I think they actually over paid for that mower, it simply reflects how competitively efficient it is to build a new mower out of new raw materials.
Subtract the cost to get the mower to the scrapyard, probably several dollars for the gas, and your donated time, and it shows how even recycling metals is barely profitable in terms of energy in vs. energy out. Had you not recycled, a new, comparable mower, the price increase would only be $10.
I got 4 whopping CENTS per pound last time I brought steel in. 600+ pounds of steel, a whole $15.25 in my pocket.
The diesel I burned hauling the stuff in cost nearly that much!