Insulated Copper Wire Scrap

ICW and cable priced on verified copper recovery

Insulated copper wire is not bought by the tonne of cable; it is bought by the tonne of copper inside the cable. The whole trade turns on recovery percentage — the copper yielded when the lot is chopped and separated — and every grade name in the market is really shorthand for a recovery band. No. 1 ICW is heavy building wire such as THHN and THW, bare-bright underneath a single PVC or nylon jacket, typically recovering 85% and above. No. 2 ICW is thinner, often tinned or double-insulated, recovering roughly 55–70%. Romex-type house wire with its paper filler and ground conductor sits near 60–65%. Automotive harness wire, with its thin gauges and heavy connector content, drops to 40–50%. Communication and CAT5 cable is thinner still, and coax and heliax lower again because of the aluminium shield and steel messenger. Because the range is this wide, a lot sold simply as "copper cable" tells you nothing about its value.

The discipline that makes this trade work is testing. We take a representative sample from the lot, chop and granulate it, weigh the recovered copper against the sample weight and contract to the verified figure — not to the seller's claim. Where a buyer runs their own granulation line, we can ship against an outturn settlement so the final payment follows the recovery actually achieved, with the inspection agency sealing samples at loading. The variables that shift recovery are gauge, insulation type — PVC, XLPE and rubber all behave differently in a granulator — and contamination from steel armour, aluminium conductor, connectors and moisture. Aluminium conductor in particular is a common substitution risk in service and MCM cable and is worth checking on every lot. Pricing then works back from the LME copper cash settlement applied to the recovered copper, less the processing cost of chopping, separation and the residual plastic that has to be disposed of. Note that cable scrap sits inside the Basel green-list framework for metal and alloy scrap in non-dispersible form, so shipments to certain destinations travel with Annex VII documentation; we prepare it, alongside radiation certification and inspection, on FOB, CFR and CIF terms.