Maple Leaf Metals is located at 4510 - 68 Avenue. They are the place to bring scrap metals of all kinds. I had heard that they pay the best money for the scrap, and overall I was happy with my MLM experience.

Last week I borrowed the Habitat Studios truck and loaded up the metallic material that I collected out of the house that stood at 9805 - 84th Avenue.

The two natural gas ranges, furnace, dryer, and hot water heater have no scrap value. That’s probably because they would require some labour to take apart. So I took those to the Eco Station:

Tristan from Habitat Studios is standing in front of the truck. Major appliances are accepted for free at Edmonton Eco Stations

Then I loaded up all the other metals. It’s important to keep the copper somewhat separated, because it’s worth the most. And yes, copper wiring counts, even with the insulating plastic on it.

Galvanized steel water pipes, cast iron drain pipes, natural gas lines, furnace ducting, and most importantly, copper wire and piping.

Off to Maple Leaf Metals:

They inspect the metal that you have, and then direct you into a warehouse if there’s anything worth sorting out. We pulled out the copper wiring and pipes and separated them into bins, because they pay a different rate for each. Then, they weighed the entire truck on a scale, and sent me to the yard. It reminded me of what hell might look like:

I kept expecting one of the yard monsters to begin eating me. I’m always uncomfortable on construction sites - a nerd in a pickup truck is like a fish out of water. The workers directed me to a big machine with a magnet on it. Once I backed up, the operator began pulling the scrap metal out of the truck. Here’s the view looking back from the front seat:

Magnetic Metal Picker Upper

Payment

Once they had the scrap metal (as in, the non-copper metal), they weighed the truck again to determined how many pounds I had given them. I went to the office for my big payday:

• copper pipe: 11 pounds at about $2.30/pound
• copper wire: 39 pounds at about $0.75/pound (approximate I need to find the receipt and update this post)
• scrap metal: 1000 pounds at $0.035/pound

I walked out with $85.95 cash money! Woohoo! With all my labour included, I made $6-$7/hour taking that metal out.

What the heck though - this isn’t my day job after all, and I did good: 1050 pounds of materials didn’t get landfilled, and a lot of energy was saved by recycling metal instead of mining it from scratch.

(cross posted at www.greenEdmonton.ca )