How to Determine Scrap Catalytic Converter Prices? Over the years we’ve heard a lot of stories about different catalytic converter prices and how people have always felt cheated when selling their cats. We hear you and we’ve even been on that boat before; Not knowing what something is worth is one of the hardest things to do when scrapping because you’re essentially trusting which junkyard or catalytic converter buyer will tell you the truth… it’s hard.
So let’s take a step back and talk about where catalytic converter prices come from and where they go from there. To get metal scrap yard near me service, we come to you the same day by contacting us.
Comparing Catalytic Converters with Copper Wire
If you want to compare catalytic converter prices to copper wire, it can give you a better idea of recovery and markets. Let’s take a simple wire like THHN wire and compare it. Because copper is traded, pricing is relatively easy, and a pound of copper would equal whatever the market is today. For our example, let’s say it’s worth $1.00 per pound (hopefully higher as you read this!).
If you have 100 pounds of THHN and the copper content is 75%, that means 100 pounds * 75% = 75 pounds of copper and it’s worth $75 per pound at $1.
That was easy, wasn’t it? Simple? Certainly! But how do we do that for catalytic converters, which is the problem? The daily scraper, auto mechanic, parts mechanic or scrap dealer usually can’t do this because they have to have multiple cats of the same type to get that percentage of each precious metal, and it is very difficult to do.
The 100 Pound Catalytic Converter can have varying amounts of these precious metals compared to the next 100 pounds. This issue is why catalytic converters need to be priced per piece, not by weight.
What Are Diesel Catalytic Converters and DPFs?
Since the late 2000s, the use of DPFs (Diesel Particulate Filters) has been introduced to the diesel world as a new form of catalytic converter. There was a problem with diesel engines often burning dirtier than gas engines. Since many of you were driving and saw black smoke coming out of a dump truck or tow truck on the road and… woe! So did many auto and truck manufacturers, and they’re starting to do something to change that (new laws helping to reduce greenhouse emissions also had something to do with it).
These new DPFs have helped reduce black smoke emissions and burn diesel trucks, vans, buses and other vehicles much cleaner and more efficiently…..and have created a new category of catalytic converters for scrap!
These DPFs and the catalytic converters to be used with them often have a much higher rating (3 to 200 times!!!) than older catalytic converters in earlier models of the same vehicles and trucks.
How to Find out the Real Price of Cats?
An answer…impossible, but we’ll explain. Unless you have 100 catalytic converters from the same vehicle, all containing the same amount of material, and you can’t analyze these cats via a reliable processor, it will be very difficult to know the number of precious metals in them. This is why metal scrap yards and catalytic converter buyers exist to buy them from you (hopefully at a fair market price) and then match them with other cats they own and ship them to downstream vendors and processors.
