About scrapsmetalprices.com
scrapsmetalprices.com publishes daily, LME-anchored estimates of scrap metal prices across 45 Australian cities, alongside a directory of 458 verified yards and a calculator that values common household items by their metal content. The site is built to be the reference Australian sellers can use before contacting a yard — with full transparency about how every number on the site is derived.
Why this site exists
Australian sellers — tradies clearing a build site, homeowners stripping copper from a renovation, demolition contractors handling industrial volumes — have historically had to choose between two unsatisfying sources for scrap pricing:
- Individual yard rate cards, which are advertising. They show the rate the yard wants you to expect; what they actually pay depends on grading at the weighbridge.
- Overseas pricing aggregators, which quote international LME prices that don’t reflect Australian transport, smelter access, or regional differences. A copper price in London is not what a Darwin yard pays per kilogram.
Neither tells you what your specific load is likely to fetch this week in your city.
This site tries to fix that. We anchor every estimate to the actual London Metal Exchange close, apply a published payout rate per grade, and adjust for regional transport costs from a Sydney benchmark (Sydney = 1.00×). Every step is documented on the methodology page.
What we publish
- National metal pages — daily LME-anchored prices for copper, aluminium, brass, steel, stainless, lead, zinc, and nickel, with grade breakdowns and educational content on how each metal is sorted at the yard.
- 45 city hub pages — current scrap prices localised to each city’s regional adjustment, with state context and links to peer markets.
- 304 city × metal pages — long-tail combinations covering common queries like “scrap copper Brisbane” or “aluminium Perth,” with grade-specific local payouts.
- 54 item value pages — what specific items like washing machines, car batteries, and Hills hoists are worth in scrap value, with component breakdowns and preparation tips.
- 458 verified scrap yards — directory built from public Google Places data, with addresses, phone numbers, distances from city centres, and aggregated Google review ratings. Searchable by city.
- A live calculator — enter weight, grade, city, and get an estimated payout range with the calculation broken down step-by-step.
Prices refresh daily at 06:15 Sydney time via international metals API feeds, with a cascade of fallbacks (MetalpriceAPI → Metals.Dev → Yahoo Finance → last-known-good cache) for reliability.
Editorial principles
1. No affiliate relationships with yards. We don’t accept payment for inclusion in the directory, for prominence in listings, or for favourable framing. Yards are listed based on public information, and our directory ratings come from Google’s review averages — not anything we control.
2. No invented pricing. Every number on the site is derived from an LME spot price × a published payout rate × a regional adjustment × weight. The full chain is auditable from the methodology page. We don’t fabricate “premium yard” rates or claim insider data we don’t have.
3. Honest about uncertainty. Yard payouts vary by load size, day of the week, contamination, and grading discretion. Our estimates carry a ±15% range because that’s the reality of the market. We don’t pretend to know better than the weighbridge.
4. Corrections welcomed. If a yard’s NAP data is wrong, a price reads incorrectly, or our methodology is off, submit a correction. We treat these submissions seriously and act on them within a few days.
5. User-submitted price reports. We’re building a system for sellers to share what they actually got paid at named yards. Once volume builds, the site will show real-world transaction data alongside the LME-derived estimates — not replacing them, but complementing them with ground truth.
How we make money
scrapsmetalprices.com displays advertising provided by Google AdSense, which keeps the site free for users and free from yard-paid placement bias. We do not accept paid inclusion in the yard directory. We do not have affiliate links. We do not modify content based on advertiser interest. If we ever introduce paid yard placements or a premium tier, it will be clearly labelled and segregated from editorial content.
What we’re not
We are not a yard. We do not buy or sell metal. We do not broker transactions. We do not have a physical presence in Australia. We are an editorial reference, similar in spirit to a Bloomberg ticker for the LME — except focused on what those numbers translate to at the weighbridge in Sydney, Perth, Darwin, and 42 other cities.
If you need to actually sell metal, our city directories list real yards with real phone numbers. Call them. Get a quote. Use our estimates as a sanity check.
Who runs this
This site is maintained by Murray Brown. I grew up never far from the metal trade — weekends spent sorting copper offcuts in a relative’s yard, learning the difference between bare bright and dirty wire long before I understood why it mattered to the price. That early exposure stuck. Over the years since, I’ve watched too many people carry a genuinely good load into a yard and walk out underpaid, for no better reason than that they had no independent reference for what their metal was actually worth on the day.
scrapsmetalprices.com is my attempt to close that gap. An earlier version of this site had fallen into disrepair — poor technical foundations, and eventually a security breach that filled it with spam — so what you’re reading now is a complete rebuild from the ground up. The focus this time is on three things: transparent methodology, pricing that’s honest about its own uncertainty, and guides that respect your time rather than pad out a word count.
It’s a one-person editorial project. I maintain the daily price data, write the guides, and read every submission and correction myself. The site doesn’t accept payment from yards, doesn’t run affiliate links, and doesn’t tilt its content toward anyone’s commercial interest — it’s funded entirely by display advertising so the pricing stays neutral. If you spot something wrong, tell me. I’d genuinely rather know.
You can reach me through the submission forms or at admin@scrapsmetalprices.com.
How to reach us
The fastest way to reach us is via the submission forms:
- Submit a yard — for yards not yet in the directory
- Submit a price report — share what you actually got paid
- Submit a correction — if something on the site looks wrong
For other matters, email admin@scrapsmetalprices.com.
Site founded 2026. This About page last updated May 2026.