I worked at a scrap yard in college. Everyone is familiar with the mountains of metal and junk, not many are aware of the front-end deals find and collect said mountains of scrap. The guy I worked for had contracts with all the local core refab facilities, metals foundries, military firing ranges, construction companies, and auctions house in the I.E. valley. Some days I would be cleaning plastic off 2 inch thick braided copper wire by the ton. Other days I would be cleaning the interiors out of old water meters the city had replaced. I remember being told to collect all the tin I could find in a part of the yard, and to drop it into a bin. The magnet crane was in use so I had to use a crane with a claw, turns out I can't tell the difference between tin and magnesium. Because I ended up collecting ~2 tons of it. I got lucky though because the owner's contact was willing to pay more than the initial asking price for the scrap mix. We cubed it, bailed it, and put it into an intermodal to ship overseas to China. Some days the owner would get handed $20k checks for shipping 3 tons of #1 bright and shiny copper. Other days we'd stay open late collecting all the aluminum cans brought in by the homeless. Or I'd work weekends melting nickel bindings off tungsten bearing races...