The price of aluminum is up these days, and that’s the case for most other valuable metals… gold, silver, copper. That also means theft of valuable metal is on the rise even here in Idaho. I wanted to find out how much extra money I could make with a bag full of aluminum cans. So, I took them to the Pacific Steel and Recycling center in Boise.
That’s where I met Mike Cataldo. He’s the regional manager at the recycling center. He sees lots of aluminum cans like mine, but lately, he’s also seeing a lot of strange things coming through the doors. "So, what are some of the odder items that have shown up here?" I ask Cataldo. He laughs and says they often get headstones. What he means is that people will bring in the brass plates off headstones and try to cell them ot the center for cash. Most of the time, he says it’s perfectly normal if the plates need to be replaced. But, it’s things like those brass plaques, and copper wiring that have Cataldo on high alert.
With the prices of valuable metals up, so is theft and that’s got Cataldo so concerned about his business, he admits to profiling some of his customers “. ;If you see somebody who comes in with a bunch of stripped wire, you have to ask ‘Where did you get this?’ ‘Well, I work for an electrical contractor.’ ‘Well, is this your material or their material?’ ‘Well, it’s their material,’” explains Cataldo. He says if it’s coming from a construction company or job site, the material is put in the owners name. But, he says, "if a guy comes and he’s got copper wire in the back of his truck or if it’s hard drawn wire that we know might be from the railroad or something like that, they don’t have the right answers- ‘I found it!’ ‘Well, where’d you find it?’ And they’re really vague about it."
Stealing valuable metals is a crime Detective Mike Hill says seems victimless. “I think people look at scrapping as taking someone’s garbage,”says Hill.
Hill is the retail crimes detective with the Boise Police Department.
But, Hill says stealing valuable metal is anything but victimless.
“No. there’s definite victims out there. Someone’s gotta replace the wiring on electrical lines people steal. And somebody’s got replace the cost or the air conditioning unit that may just have been removed for service and not replacement.”
Hill says he sees everything go missing – from abandoned cars to copper coiling in air conditioning units.
“Well we see just wiring stripped out of houses or buildings under construction. We have seen supply companies broken into and had whole trucks full of brand new wiring maybe destined for construction sites stolen. Really, if it’s made of metal and it’s not nailed down and even if it is nailed down, it definitely will come up missing and end up in a scrap yard.”
Detective Hill says it’s no easy task to track down a thief or the metal that might have been stolen.
“Generally the sheathing or the insulation on the wiring is burned off. Or the metal is cut up so that it’s not recognizable any more say the coils out of air conditioning unit or a vehicle or motorcycle might be cut up just to scrap metal so its difficult to link the actual item back to the victim and then linking the item sold at the scrap yard back to the seller and actually generating valid suspect out of the information is difficult.”
The money you stand to make depends on what kind of metal you bring in and how much you have. The recycling center pays by the pound. My 28 cans get processed at the recycling center and then i head into the office to find out how much aluminum is selling for. "It’s about 50 cents a pound," says Mary Novick, who works the cash register behind the counter. It turns out, it takes just about 28 cans to get a pound of aluminum, but two mine were steel, which isn’t as valuable. Novick kindly rounds up the amount of aluminum I brought in and hands me two quarters, which isn’t even enough to buy myself another can of soda.
The state mandates that anyone who brings in more than twenty dollars worth of metal must present identification, their license plate number and a vehicle description. But I’d need eleven-hundred soda cans to make twenty dollars.