China Daily

BROCKTON, Massachusetts -- Shards of broken glass outside the basement window of 31 Vine Street hint at the destruction inside the three-story home.

Thieves smashed the window to break in and then gutted the property for its copper pipes -- a crime that has spread across the United States as the economy slows and foreclosed homes stand empty and vulnerable.

"They cut it here and then pulled it right out of the wall," real estate broker Marc Charney said, pointing to broken plaster near a wrecked baseboard heating system in the 2,774-sq-ft home in Brockton, Massachusetts, a working-class city of 94,304 people.

Similar stories are unfolding nationwide as a glut of home foreclosures coincides with record highs in the price of copper and other metals.

Real estate brokers and local authorities say once-proud homes coast-to-coast are being stripped for copper, aluminum, and brass by thieves. Much of it ends up with scrap metal traders who say nearly all copper gets shipped overseas.

In areas hit hardest by foreclosures, such as the Slavic Village neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio, copper and other metals used in plumbing, heating systems and telephone lines are now more valuable than some homes.

"We're in an incredibly unfortunate time where the nonferrous metals commodities market for scrap is at an all-time high. Houses are getting stripped pretty quickly once they go through the foreclosure process," Cleveland city councilor Tony Brancatelli said.

"We're seeing houses sold for $100 that are distressed houses that should not be recycled," he said. Some boarded-up homes in his Slavic Village community have "No copper, only PVC" painted on the boards to stop would-be thieves.

In Brockton, which suffered 400 foreclosures last year, blamed largely on predatory lending, and which is bracing for another 400 this year, Charney said the thieves inflicted about $15,000 of damage on the home on Vine Street.

"I had this property under agreement. We negotiated. The offer was accepted. The buyer came back to the property three weeks later only to find they had gotten in and stolen the copper, so we had to go back to the bank and renegotiate," said Charney, president of CharneyRealEstate.com.

After haggling, the bank shaved $5,000 off the $105,000 price.

"The problem is there's almost no security. Does this look like anybody lives here?" he said, gesturing to the boarded-up home with chipped yellow paint and a "notice of foreclosure" letter affixed to its door.

"It's like a big billboard saying 'come and take me,"' he added. "It's an epidemic."

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I did inhale.

A guy here in my neck of So Cal electrocuted himself when he tried to steal the high tension electrical lines presumably for their copper value. At least he should have tried the stepped-down voltage lines first. I've heard of manhole covers being stolen. It's getting ugly but it's gonna get worse.

If I remember correctly, when war hits, the first place govenments go to is the scrap-yards.
What will happen in the world when, war erupts and nowhere is scrap metal to be found to build the necessary military infrastructure and worst, when peace comes, nothing to rebuild.
Are we going to buy back all those metals from the ennemy.
It's about time goverments put caps on the exportation of so called scrap metal, because the bigger picture is really uggly.
Further more, reprocessing scrap metal is more environmentally friendly than mining for new ressources. But I guess that the big mining companies really want all that scrap to leave our countries, it's just good capitalist practice.

Perhaps we'll see a return of the rag-and-bone man. When I was young, I remember the junkman and his truck crusing the neighborhood once a week. Anyone remember when toothbrushes and hairbrushes had bone handles?

Thieves will always find something to steal. But maybe we'll start taking the notion of recycling seriously again.

I remember being surprised how a country can have scrap metal as its main export! I guess there are little Kosovo's all over the map nowadays.

But with the Chinese stock market crashing, it looks as if the economy there is about to tumble. The demand pressure for scrap metal will likely go down with it.

Labor is cheap is developing countries, while commodities (metals, etc.) are getting expensive everywhere. Recycling and waste disposal tends to cost us money here in the US, Europe, and Japan. But in China and other such countries, it is a profitable growth industry--though highly toxic and dangerous to the environment.

As you mention in your post, your hands were burning the insulation off the wires. In China they have industries that take giant piles of wires and electronics and burn the plastic off into the air in order to get at the metals inside. Dioxins, CO2, and all sorts of crap come out of that. There are processes involving the use of various acids and cyanide to strip plastic off metals--and this is usually done near water supplies. There have been studies to determine the levels of carcinogens present in the populations near these sites in China and they have found upwards of 85% of the people have dangerous accumulations in their bodies.

I lived in Mexico from 1993 to 96. After the devaluation, when the economy was tanking, I saw much the same thing. You'd wake up in the morning and try to use your phone and it would be dead. During the night, someone had stripped the telephone lines for the copper. It got to where you had to watch where you were driving because they began stealing the manhole covers off the street.

What's happening here isn't just people trying to cash in on record high scrap prices. It's the unraveling of the fabric of American society, a slow slide from first world status to that nether world where the rich wonder why on earth would anyone steal an air conditioning coil and the poor wonder how many more they'll have to steal before they figure out another way to feed themselves.

Well, this is timely. I don't know about any copper wire, by my daughter was a pack rat. Guess I opt for a massive garage sale before considering donating 200+ pairs of jeans, 6 sets of dishes, and every widget known to WalMart.

So, the battery is worth at least $16.PLAYON JRBehrman sends .....

is so high! I would have thought since paper products are so plentiful that they wouldn't be worth much.

Could an Agonist clue me in as to why paper fetches such a high scrap price? Seems #2 Steel fetches the highest price? Does anyone know why #2 Steel is so valuable?