A survey report
With almost everyone worried and almost every industry hit worse by the economic slowdown, scrap industry is still on the fast paced growth track. To find the reason behind this, we decided to team up and interview some of the professional scrap traders. We started with the metal scrap industry last week and here is what our team discovered:
Metal scrap industry still Blooming?
When asked about the current market trends, Mr. Carver a professional scrap trader said “We do a lot of business these days, probably more than what we did when the economic condition was good. However, we have stopped buying scrap materials other than metals.” “We take all stuff that has any kind of metal in it. Home appliances, used machinery, scrap cans, scrap cars-we buy everything.”
When some of the scrap traders work just for cash, some others have found a new hobby in it. We were surprised to see a huge collection of old cars, well polished and shiny parked besides a scrap yard. Mr. Ben the owner of the scrap yard says, “the economic slowdown combined with the sky-rocketing oil prices has made the old car owners to dump the less fuel efficient antique cars in scrap yards to get money. We get them for a very cheap price and as some of the old cars were too good to be scrapped, we got in to a new hobby of collecting antique cars”.
Mr. Kent prefers scrap cars over other scrap materials as they are huge sources of steel and Aluminium. “Usually we don’t buy scrap cars with gas tanks, tires and other non-metallic parts. The truth is we pay more money for the scrap cars whose non-metallic parts are already removed. We shred them and sell it to steel and Aluminium mills” When asked about the impact of current economic condition on scrap industry, Mr. Kent’s words where “According to me, the current economic condition is good for scrap industry. As you can see here (pointing a huge heap of scrap cars) people cannot afford the gas costs in this current economic situation and that has added more scrap cars at a cheaper price to my yard. We now get scrap cars for very cheap prices than we usually do”.
We are now seriously thinking whether this Economic Slowdown is good for the Scrap Industry. We won’t be convinced unless we hear the words of more scrap traders. So we have planned to continue our survey for one more week. We will get back to you with more updates “later”.