Scrap copper and brass collection for plumbers.

Plumbing scrap is the easy money of this industry. Copper pipe comes off the job essentially clean, brass fittings are dense and valuable for their size, and a hot water unit nobody wants to cart away has a copper cylinder inside it on a lot of models.

What we buy off plumbers

• Copper pipe and tube. Clean, bare, no fittings attached pays the top band. Pipe with brass fittings still on it is fine too, we just grade it accordingly, and if there is a lot of it we will sort it with you.
• Brass. Tapware, valves, fittings, gate valves, meters, flanges. Heavy for its size and one of the better rates after copper.
• Hot water units and cylinders. Electric, gas and solar. We take them whole. Some have a copper inner cylinder, some are glass-lined steel, and the difference is most of the value, so it matters that whoever is weighing it knows which is which.
• Cast iron and steel pipe. Old DWV stacks, galvanised runs. Low rate, high weight, and it is the stuff you most want off your yard.
• Stainless. Sinks, troughs, commercial kitchen pipework.
• Lead. Old flashings and jointing lead. Still bought, still worth money, and it needs to be handled properly rather than binned.
• Pumps and motors. Pressure pumps, circulators, pool pumps.

What it pays

Indicative rates, the same ones on the home page. Metal markets move every week, so ring 0435 805 124 for the exact figure before you load up.

The big swing is clean copper versus mixed. Keeping a separate drum for bare pipe, with no brass fittings, no solder lumps and no plastic, is usually the single highest-paid half hour a plumbing crew spends in a week.

Changeovers are where the value is

A hot water changeover is a scrap job wearing a plumbing hat. There is the old unit, the old copper you cut out, the fittings you replaced and sometimes a whole run of pipe. On a busy week that is a meaningful second line of income on work you were doing anyway, and it beats paying for tip fees to get rid of the same material.

How we work with plumbing businesses

1. Tell us your depot or yard suburb and roughly what comes through a week.
2. We set you up with a bin for mixed steel and a drum or cage for copper and brass, so clean metal stays clean.
3. Call when it is ready, or fix a standing collection day.
4. Weighed on site by metal type, in front of you.
5. Paid to the business by EFT, with the weights in writing.