How to Compare Domestic and Export Offers for Bulk Scrap

Selling scrap in bulk is a completely different game to dropping off a ute load at your local yard, and it helps to know the rules before you start. If you’re new to this side of things, selling scrap in bulk is worth understanding properly, and we’ll cover the essentials here.

When you first look into bulk scrap, a lot of the terminology can feel a bit opaque. Minimum order quantities, container loads, grades, net weights, FOB and CIF terms — none of it is complicated in itself, but there’s quite a lot of it, and it all adds up. The good news is that underneath the jargon, this is a fairly straightforward business of matching material you have with a buyer who needs it. Let’s work through the main pieces so none of it catches you off guard.

How Container Loads Work

When people talk about selling scrap by the container load, they usually mean a standard 20-foot or 40-foot shipping container packed with material. A 20-foot container can generally hold somewhere between 18 and 28 tonnes of scrap metal, depending on how dense the material is and how tightly it’s packed.

This is where density becomes the thing to think about. Heavy, compact material like steel turnings or plate offcuts will fill a container’s weight allowance quickly, while lighter scrap like aluminium extrusion or mixed household goods might fill the whole box and still leave weight allowance unused. Knowing roughly where your material sits on that scale makes it much easier to plan a load.

How Bulk Scrap Is Priced

The price you’re offered per tonne isn’t just about the metal itself. Buyers factor in how much processing they’ll have to do before they can on-sell it, how much it costs to collect it from you, and what grade they can realistically recover. A load that looks identical to another on the surface can be worth noticeably less once those costs are taken into account.

Timing plays a part as well. Metal prices fluctuate weekly, sometimes daily, and a quote you get on a Monday may not hold by Friday. Most serious buyers will give you a price that’s valid for a set period, and locking in a supply arrangement can protect you from the worst of the swings if your business generates scrap steadily.

What Bulk Buyers Are Looking For

A buyer purchasing scrap by the tonne is really looking for three things: material they can rely on, in a quantity that makes the trip worthwhile, at a price that lets them make a margin. Consistency matters to them far more than a one-off big load, because their own operations are planned around knowing what’s coming in.

They also care a great deal about what’s in the load, and more importantly what shouldn’t be. A single piece of the wrong material — a chunk of concrete in a steel load, or plastic contamination in a copper load — can be enough to have the whole load downgraded or rejected. Clean, well-sorted material is genuinely worth more, and buyers remember suppliers who get this right.

Getting Your Scrap Ready

Before a load goes anywhere, it pays to have it sorted, clean, and documented. That means separating the metals you’ve got, keeping non-metallic material out of it, and knowing roughly how much weight you actually have. A bit of effort at this stage almost always comes back as a better price per tonne.

If you’re unsure how to tell one grade from another, it’s worth spending a little time on the basics. If you want to get better at spotting what you actually have, how to identify scrap metal walks through it in plain language. It’s the kind of knowledge that pays for itself the first time you sort a load properly.

Working Out How Much You Actually Have

One of the first questions any bulk buyer will ask is how much material you’ve got, and they mean weight, not volume. If you can give them a realistic tonnage, you’re far more likely to get a sensible conversation started. A rough estimate based on what you can see is a reasonable starting point, but an actual weighbridge ticket carries far more weight, literally and commercially.

It’s also useful to understand the difference between gross and net weight. Gross is everything including the container, packaging, or vehicle it’s in; net is the material itself. Buyers care about net recoverable metal, so any moisture, contamination, or non-metallic content comes off that figure. Being clear about which number you’re quoting avoids a lot of confusion further down the line.

Where to Go From Here

It might seem like there’s a lot to get on top of, but it’s really just a matter of understanding quantities, grades, and what your buyer needs. For a thorough walkthrough of selling scrap in bulk, including how minimum orders work, that guide is the best place to start.

Being able to sort your material properly matters, so it’s worth reading how to identify scrap metal before you prepare a load. Once you’ve got the material side sorted, the commercial side falls into place much more easily.

None of this needs to be learned all at once. Most businesses that do well with bulk scrap started by selling smaller quantities locally, learned what buyers actually wanted, and built up to larger loads as their volume and confidence grew. If that’s the path you’re on, the most useful first step is simply to find out what you’ve got and roughly how much of it there is. Everything else follows from there.