Hello! Value in used copper mig welding tips?

Hello All,

I know someone who works at large fabrication company. Surprisingly management have no mandatory recycling or accountability program for copper mig welding nozzles and tips. Granted everything you request you need to do your job is logged and audit reports are generated for suspicious high use of items.

They showed me thier stash of tips all loaded with carbon and some have mig wires stuck in them.

Are they worth anything? How much per pound?

Higher grade copper, they are a pinkish color band new?

Melt them down to get rid of impurities and sell bars online?

I told him he's wasting his time as according to Google it looks like copper scrap is $2 a pound.

Seems a waste though to just toss them out or throw them in the general steel scrap bin at work.

Thanks

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Scrap011266

Hello All,

I know someone who works at large fabrication company. Surprisingly management have no mandatory recycling or accountability program for copper mig welding nozzles and tips. Granted everything you request you need to do your job is logged and audit reports are generated for suspicious high use of items.

They showed me thier stash of tips all loaded with carbon and some have mig wires stuck in them.

Are they worth anything? How much per pound?

Higher grade copper, they are a pinkish color band new?

Melt them down to get rid of impurities and sell bars online?

I told him he's wasting his time as according to Google it looks like copper scrap is $2 a pound.

Seems a waste though to just toss them out or throw them in the general steel scrap bin at work.

Thanks

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$2/lb would be optimistic at this time. they would probably go as #2 copper, probably around $1.40/lb at least by me.

Definitely not worth melting or selling online. But idk why you couldn't just put out a 55gal drum and say "hey guys instead of throwing them out put all copper bits in here". then when its full you can take it in to the scrap yard. Not sure how much it would be in weight/money but I would bet at least a couple hundred bucks. Up to you to decide if thats worth it or not.

Edit: after some quick googling (which actually redirrected back to a post here) a 55gal drum of clean copper weighs about 475/lbs. My assumption is that that is coper wire, which compresses better than solid copper tips/bit. So I would guess maybe somewhere around 400lbs would fill a drum. So a full drum at current prices would be ~$560 with some basic back of a napkin math here and estimation. Do with that info whatever youd like. If all it takes is throwing something in 1 bin, vs another (copper bin vs the garbage bin), I would say its worth it. You/the people there may not agree, especially if THEY arent getting a cut of that, what motivation would they have to care, theyll just do whatever is most convenient (probably the garbage)

We have 6 full time welders at our shop, and we tried saving tips and nozzles for a year - apparently, you need ALOT of welding hours to accumulate enough to make anything profitable. I believe we ended up getting roughly 30 lbs of copper after just under a year. If you think about the weight of tips, that's alot of tips! For myself it would be a great addition to a weekly run to multiple businesses (or a great christmas party for the company when tacked on to the alum/brass/copper retrieved from other operations). Really, at the end of the day, it's better than a kick in the pants!

Like KSS mentioned, #2 copper would be the grading I'd give - Got a whole whopping 1.60$/lbs CAD last week WOOOOO!

I manufacture snow chains for a living.... scrapping is my spending money... i save my welding tips and my plazma consumables (doesn't amount to very much) and I throw them in with my #2