Aluminum has the widest value spread of any common shop scrap. Two containers leaving the same building on the same day can differ by two or three times per pound.
The metal inside is usually not the reason. The reason is sorting, contamination, and whether anyone named the grade before the load left.
Here is how the grading system actually works and where manufacturers lose money in it.
The Divide That Matters Most: Wrought Versus Cast
If you take one thing from this article, take this.
Wrought aluminum is anything rolled, drawn, or extruded. Sheet, plate, extrusion profile, tube, bar. It carries relatively low silicon and it is what secondary mills want for rolling and extruding applications.
Cast aluminum is anything poured into a mold. Housings, engine components, wheels, pump bodies, machine castings. Cast alloys carry substantially higher silicon because silicon improves castability.
Those two streams cannot be freely mixed. Drop castings into a container of clean wrought material and the silicon content of the whole load moves, which means the entire container gets priced as the lower-value material. You do not get a blended price. You get the downgraded one.
If your operation generates both, that is your first two containers, and it is usually the highest-return sorting decision available to you.
Grades Are Defined by What Is Not in Them
This is the part manufacturers consistently underestimate.
The Recycled Materials Association, formerly ISRI, publishes the Scrap Specifications Circular that the industry grades against. Read any aluminum specification and you will notice it is written almost entirely as an exclusion list.
Take Taint/Tabor, clean mixed old alloy sheet aluminum. The specification calls for clean old alloy aluminum sheet of two or more alloys, and then specifies it must be free of foil, venetian blinds, castings, hair wire, screen wire, food or beverage containers, radiator shells, airplane sheet, bottle caps, plastic, dirt, and other non-metallic items. Oil and grease are limited to no more than one percent.
Note the structure. The grade is not defined by what you put in. It is defined by what you kept out.
Other aluminum specifications carry similar constraints. Some exclude 2000 and 7000 series material outright, because those high-copper and high-zinc aerospace alloys contaminate a melt. Some set minimum thickness. Several cap oil and grease at one percent.
This is why a handful of steel bolts can move an entire container. The specification does not say mostly free of foreign attachments. It says free of them, and the receiving grader applies that standard to your load, not to the average load.
The Grades a Manufacturing Plant Actually Generates
Most industrial operations produce four or five distinguishable streams. Knowing which you have is most of the work.
Clean Wrought Sheet, Plate, and Extrusion
Your highest-value material. Drops, offcuts, punch skeleton, and trim from clean stock.
If you run a single alloy family, say 6061 extrusion or 5052 sheet, keeping it segregated by alloy rather than lumping it into mixed low-copper aluminum is worth real money. Mills pay for material they can use directly without diluting.
Painted, Anodized, and Coated Stock
Coatings are a deduction, and the grading system recognizes the distinction between painted and unpainted material. Anodizing, powder coat, and paint all add non-metallic mass that burns off or has to be accounted for.
Keep coated material in its own container. Mixing it into clean stock pulls the clean material down rather than pulling the coated material up.
Castings
Separate container, always, for the silicon reason above. Machine shop castings, housings, and cast components are legitimate salable material at a legitimate price. They just are not wrought.
Turnings, Borings, and Chips
The lowest-value form of aluminum you generate, and the one where handling changes the number most.
The issues are oil and moisture. Machining chips arrive saturated with coolant, and typical specifications cap oil and grease at around one percent. Wet turnings blow through that immediately.
Two process changes move turnings up. Centrifuging removes free coolant. Briquetting compacts chips into dense pucks that handle better, ship better, and melt with lower loss. Both cost money. On sustained volume, both frequently pay.
Also keep alloys separate in turnings. Machine shops that run one bin for all aluminum chips are converting sorted material back into mixed material at the point of generation.
Mixed and Shredded Material
If your aluminum ends up as Zorba, shredded nonferrous scrap that is predominantly aluminum, the sort has already been lost.
Zorba has a useful naming convention worth knowing. The specification calls for the grade to be identified with a number indicating estimated nonferrous metal content, so Zorba 90 means roughly 90 percent nonferrous content. That number is negotiated and it drives the price.
For a manufacturer, Zorba is generally a sign that material went into a shredder stream rather than being segregated at the source. That is appropriate for end-of-life equipment. It is an expensive outcome for production scrap.
What Actually Costs You Money
Five deductions account for most of the gap between what a load could be worth and what it settles at.
Attachments. Steel bolts, rivets, hinges, plastic clips, rubber grommets, and wire insulation are all deductible. They add weight you are not paid for and they can trigger a grade change on the whole container.
Oil and coolant. Recurring one percent limits across specifications, and turnings exceed that routinely without processing.
Alloy mixing. Cast into wrought is the big one. So is 2xxx or 7xxx material into a low-copper stream.
Moisture. An uncovered container in a Cincinnati winter collects snow and rain. That is weight the buyer will not pay for and a moisture deduction on top.
Unverified alloy. If nobody on your side confirmed what the material is, the receiving grader’s determination is the only one that exists. That is not necessarily unfair. It is simply one-sided.
How Aluminum Scrap Gets Priced
Aluminum scrap is not quoted as a standalone number pulled from the air. It references primary aluminum and the applicable regional premium, less a spread that reflects the grade, the expected metal recovery from that grade, and the processing required to make it melt-ready.
Two things therefore move your check. The market, and your grade.
You control none of the first and nearly all of the second.
We covered the mechanics of index-referenced pricing and how to audit it in our earlier piece on signs a plant is losing money on scrap, so this article stays on the material side. The short version: if your agreement does not name the reference and the spread in writing, you cannot verify anything below this line either.
Why the Spread Between Grades Widened in 2026
Timing matters here, and it argues for spending money on sorting sooner rather than later.
Section 232 tariffs on aluminum currently sit at 50 percent, and the framework was adjusted by proclamation effective June 8, 2026, running through the end of 2027, with tiered rates now applying to the full customs value of covered articles rather than the metal content alone.
Tariffs on imported primary metal raise domestic mill appetite for clean, ready-to-melt scrap, because scrap becomes a more attractive substitute for expensive primary units.
The practical consequence is specific. When primary is expensive, the premium for correctly sorted material grows and the penalty for a mixed container grows with it. A sorting program that did not quite pencil in a cheap-primary year may pencil now, and the same mixed load costs you more than it did two years ago.
Verification, and the Limit Almost Nobody Mentions
Positive material identification settles alloy questions, and the standard tool is a handheld XRF analyzer. It reads most alloying elements in seconds and it is what you will see on most yards.
Here is the limitation that matters specifically for aluminum.
XRF struggles with light elements, particularly magnesium and silicon. Those are precisely the elements that distinguish 5xxx from 6xxx, and wrought from cast. So the instrument that works well on stainless and red metals is weakest on exactly the distinctions that drive aluminum value.
LIBS, laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy, reads light elements reliably and is the better instrument for aluminum alloy sorting.
Two practical asks. Find out which instrument is being used on your material. And ask for the reading rather than the conclusion, because “it graded as mixed” is a verdict, while an elemental analysis is evidence.
Setting Up Sorting That Actually Holds
The design rule is simple and constantly violated. Sorting has to happen where the material is generated, not later. Nobody re-sorts a mixed container at a profit.
For a typical fabricating or machining operation, that means:
- A container at each machine or cell that produces a distinct stream, not one central bin
- Clear labels naming the alloy or grade, not “aluminum”
- Lids or covered placement on anything that will sit outside
- Turnings handled separately from solids, and by alloy where volumes justify it
- Castings physically separated from wrought, ideally in a different area entirely
- A named person who owns the sort and gets told when a settlement comes back downgraded
That last item is the one that makes the rest stick. Sorting discipline decays within weeks unless somebody sees the consequence.
Container placement and pickup rhythm matter more than they sound, which is why our industrial and commercial recycling programs start by looking at where material is generated rather than by dropping a roll-off in the parking lot.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is It Worth Separating 6061 From 5052?
It depends on your volumes and the current spread between them. Segregating by alloy family generally pays when a single alloy is a meaningful share of your output, because mills value material they can use without dilution. Ask for the current spread between your specific alloys before building a new container into the workflow.
How Much Does One Steel Attachment Really Cost?
More than the weight of the steel. The specifications treat foreign attachments as disqualifying rather than as a proportional deduction, so a small number of bolts can move a load’s grade rather than trimming its weight. That asymmetry is why attachment removal pays disproportionately.
Should We Buy a Handheld Analyzer?
For operations running mixed alloy inventories with significant volume, often yes, and LIBS rather than XRF if aluminum is the primary concern. For most shops, having your scrap partner verify and share the readings is sufficient and considerably cheaper.
Do We Get Paid More for Briquetted Turnings?
Usually, because briquettes ship denser, handle better, and melt with lower loss. Whether the equipment pays for itself depends on your annual turnings tonnage and your current oil deduction. Run that calculation against a real settlement history rather than a vendor’s estimate.
Start by Naming What You Generate
Before pricing anything, walk your floor and write down every distinct aluminum stream you produce, what alloy it is, and what container it currently goes into. Most operations discover two or three streams sharing one bin.
That list is the entire basis for improving what your aluminum is worth, and you can build it this week without spending anything.
Millbridge Metals works on the seller’s side of the transaction, and we are a member of the Recycled Materials Association whose specifications this article draws on. We make money by improving your return, not by buying your metal cheaply.
Request a complimentary scrap assessment, or call us today.