Junk King is proud to be North America’s top-rated junk removal company and ‘greenest’ junk removal company, as well. Part of being the most environmentally responsible junk removal company is facilitating a variety of recycling services, including metal recycling. 

At Junk King, we offer scrap metal recycling, which is helpful to remember for your next remodeling. Scrap metal recycling can include metals like iron, copper, steel, and aluminum. A lot of plumbing fixtures and construction debris contains these metals. 

Recycling at Junk King Alameda goes much further than that, however. Junk King Alameda can haul away and help you recycle the metal found in furniture, yard waste, home cleanouts, and household appliances. We work with local metal recyclers as well as charities and non-profits so that more items can be recycled, repurposed, or reused. 

Critical Facts About Metal Recycling 

Recycling scrap metal has several different yet interrelated benefits. Metal recycling includes both ferrous metals (e.g., cast iron, wrought iron, carbon steel, and alloy steel) and non-ferrous metals (e.g., aluminum, copper, zinc, and tin). The appliances, pots and pans, and furniture around your home is likely made of at least some of these metals. 

Steel is actually the most recycled metal in the United States. It is easy to melt down and create new products. You might also be surprised to hear that, while not the most recycled metal, aluminum is one of the most efficient to recycle. It is 20 times more efficient to recycle aluminum than make it in the first place as recycling aluminum uses only 5 percent of the energy. 

Recycling just one aluminum can save the energy equivalent of about a days worth of lighting (one lightbulb) or three hours of running a computer. Even though some say that over 100,000 aluminum cans are recycled every minute in the United States, only about 35 percent of aluminum-containing containers, packages, and cans are actually recycled in the United States. 

Left to its own devices, aluminum can take a staggering 500 years to decompose in a landfill. That’s unfortunate because aluminum, like steel, is an easy metal to recycle. Aluminum can be turned around into other aluminum products in as little as two months. That means the can you drank from yesterday could be recycled today and turned into a new product on the shelf in a few months! 

There are some signs that things are turning around when it comes to recycling, but there’s still more that can be done. Only about 30 percent of recyclable metal is getting recycled. That’s the part that we can improve on. The good news is that approximately 40 percent of the steel production globally right now is being done with recycled steel. Even year about a half-billion tons of metal gets recycled, so that’s definitely a reason to cheer! 

Junk King can goose that number up even more. Since Junk King is a full-service junk removal company, you can have virtually any kind of residential junk and commercial junk hauled away and safely recycled. The more items that you have containing recyclable metal the better because keeping these metals out of landfills cuts down on groundwater and soil pollution and has other benefits. 

Why Recycling Metals is Essential 

Although steel is the most recycled metal today, metals like aluminum, copper, brass, silver, and gold are following on its heels. A lot of electronics actually use silver and gold, and the more that these precious metals are recycled, the less mining that has to be done. Many of your household appliances contain copper and brass, and these are easily recyclable, too. 

Environmentally, recycling has many benefits, over and above keeping these metals out of landfills and reducing the need for new mining. Conserving more virgin materials does, indeed, mean less mining, but the more that metals can be recycled the less energy needs to be expended manufacturing new products. In other words, recycling reduces the number of harmful materials sent into the atmosphere and reduces the manufacturing costs that businesses and consumers would otherwise incur. 

Ferrous Metals 

Ferrous comes from the Latin for iron. Today, ferrous metals are still used to refer to iron, as well as steel. Iron is said to be the second-most common metal in the Earth’s crust, and iron is what contributes to the Earth’s magnetic field itself. The magnetism part is relevant because the scrap metal yards will use huge magnets to get these metals from the excavator to a truck for further processing. 

Ferrous metals eligible for metal recycling mainly come from old appliances and furniture in the United States. Appliances, furniture, and tires contributed to almost a third of recycling ferrous metals in 2018, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. This amounted to nearly 5 million tons of recycled ferrous metals that year from these durable goods alone, which equates to a lot of environmental good. 

Non-ferrous Metals 

Non-ferrous metals are said not to get chemically degraded during the recycling process, which means they can be recycled repeatedly. Aluminum, tin, copper, nickel, and zinc are some of the most common non-ferrous metals that regularly get recycled. You might also be surprised to hear that precious metals like gold and silver are also considered non-ferrous metals, and these are likely in your electronic waste. 

Non-ferrous metals have a way of punching above their weight in that they comprise about 10 percent of the total metal recycling in the United States yet about half (50 percent) of the value garnered from metal recycling. The non-ferrous scrap metal industry in the United States exports about $10 billion worth of material annually to an estimated 100 countries around the world! 

Junk King is Proud to Lead on Metal Recycling 

Ready to get started? Contact Junk King by booking an appointment online or calling 1-888-888-5865. Junk King continues to offer free, on-site estimates and a 100% quality guarantee. 

At Junk King, we work with local metal recyclers to ensure your products get recycled properly. The goal is to recycle 60% or more of every junk haul. The higher percentage of metal that can be recycled, the better for the environment.