Nine bays of mezzanine and a skip bill either way
The mezzanine over the old goods-in aisle is nine bays of it: bolted frame, profiled deck, a pallet gate at one end and a straight flight at the other, and it comes down in week two whatever else happens. What has not been decided is whether that steel leaves as a weighbridge ticket with a credit on it or as tonnage in containers you paid for twice, once to hire and once to tip. On a strip-out of any size that is not a sustainability question. It is usually the largest single swing on the waste line, and it is decided in tender week by someone standing under the frame with a tape.
The two ledgers move in opposite directions and neither is visible from a walk round. The revenue side is tonnes multiplied by a grade price you do not set. The avoided-cost side is the container volume the metal would otherwise have occupied, and metal is dense enough that it closes a container on weight while the box still looks half empty — so the skips it displaces are the expensive, part-filled ones rather than the cheap airy ones. Set against both is what it costs to get the steel into a state a yard will buy: hours on a torch or a shear, a machine and a driver, permits, a fire watch where the building is live, and a lorry that gets paid whether the load makes money or not.
The useful thing is that both sides can be settled before anybody quotes you a price. Tonnage is arithmetic on what is standing there. Grade is a reading of that same steel against a published specification. Price is the only volatile term in the whole exercise, and once tonnage and grade are fixed you can run the question backwards and ask what the tonne would have to make for the recovery to pay — which is a far better question than what is scrap worth this week.
The gate grades the load, and it grades what it can see
Ferrous scrap is not one commodity, and a mezzanine produces three or four of its grades in an afternoon. The specifications everyone downstream argues from are set out in the Scrap Specifications Circular published by ReMA, the Recycled Materials Association, still universally called the ISRI circular by the people using it. Work from the current edition rather than a remembered one. Each ferrous grade is bounded by a minimum thickness and a maximum piece size, and those two limits are precisely what decide which pile your steel joins when it comes off the lorry.
In broad shape: cut structural shapes and plate, above the thickness limit and inside the length limit, sell as Plate and Structural, which is what a mill actually wants because it charges cleanly and melts predictably. Heavier obsolete steel that is black and reasonably clean sits in the No. 1 Heavy Melting grade; galvanised material and lighter sections fall to No. 2. Everything genuinely thin — deck, infill panels, trim, ducting — is shredder feed or sheet iron, and it earns a different order of money per tonne from the beams that came out of the same bay.
Resist the temptation to talk your deck into the busheling grade. No. 1 Busheling is new, clean, factory-generated sheet clipping, prompt industrial scrap produced by a press line that morning and never used for anything. Demolition steel is obsolete scrap by definition: painted, drilled, welded, weathered, screwed to other materials and walked on for twenty years. Being thin does not make it prompt. The distinction is not pedantry — it is two separate price lines, and quoting yourself the wrong one at tender is how a metals credit evaporates on the day of the first tip.
Then there is the mixed load, which is the expensive mistake and the easy one to make. Grading happens when the body tips, performed by a person looking at what comes out, and a single bucket of light iron dropped on top of a clean structural load can pull the whole ticket down a step. If you are producing more than one grade, and a mezzanine strip-out is, you either segregate into separate stockpiles and separate movements or you accept that you are selling all of it at the price of the worst thing in it. It wants deciding before the first beam is on a lorry rather than after.
| Element | What it usually turns out to be | How it presents at the gate |
|---|---|---|
| Primary and secondary beams | Hot-rolled I sections, painted, occasionally with a sprayed coating on the underside | Plate and Structural once cut inside the grade's length limit; heavy melting if left long or dirty |
| Columns, baseplates, holding-down assemblies | Rolled sections with welded plate, bedded on grout, bolts cast into the slab | Same grade as the beams, less the grout and the concrete that stays on the baseplate |
| Profiled floor deck | Galvanised sheet to ASTM A653/A653M, typically under a millimetre and a half thick | Light gauge at best, and no grade at all while concrete is still bonded into the embossments |
| Handrail, kickplate, bracing, edge angle | Small angle, flat, tube and post, frequently galvanised | Light iron, with a piece count wildly out of proportion to its tonnage |
| Cleats, bolts, deck fixings | Assorted, some high-tensile, some plated | Grades as whatever it is still attached to when it tips |
| Cable containment, trunking, small plant | Steel, aluminium or a mixture of both with copper inside | Nonferrous where it is aluminium or copper, and only if it comes out before the grab touches it |
Building a tonnage off a frame nobody drew
Half of a mezzanine tells you its own weight if you ask it properly. Rolled beam and column designations carry mass in several national systems — a UB 305x102x25 is 25 kilograms per metre, a W16x36 is 36 pounds per foot — so where a rolling mark survives under the paint, brush it up, read it, count the members and multiply by their lengths. Before any of that, ask whether the building has an operation and maintenance file: a fabricator's grillage drawing turns an afternoon of measuring into a ten-minute tally, and on a frame erected in the last thirty years it is often still in the plant room cupboard.
The other half tells you nothing at all, and it is the half people leave out. Angle has never stated its weight in any system there is: two leg lengths and a thickness is a geometry, not a mass. A mezzanine is full of angle — the bracing in the end bays, the kickers under the rail, the edge trim the deck lands on, the stair stringers' cleats, and the entire balustrade where it was fabricated rather than bought as a proprietary system. Each piece is trivial on its own. On a frame with a lot of edge, a lot of opening and a lot of stair, the total is a real fraction of the tonne, and it is the fraction that gets guessed because nothing about it can be read off.
For this particular decision the plain angle calculation has a property worth naming: it errs downward. Treating the section as two flat legs with the heel counted once ignores the fillet in the corner and the radius at the toes, so a rolled piece weighs slightly more than the arithmetic says, and proportionally more on a light section than a heavy one. When you are deciding whether the metal funds its own removal, an estimate a couple of percent light is the safe direction to be wrong in. A load arriving heavier than predicted has never cancelled anybody's job.
- Photograph every bay from the same corner before anything moves, so a count made at the desk can be checked against the frame rather than against memory.
- Brush one flange per member type until the rolling mark reads; one legible designation answers every identical member in that grid line.
- Where nothing survives, take depth, flange width and the two thicknesses off one representative member and carry that as the type until something on site plainly differs.
- Count repeats rather than measuring everything — a mezzanine is a grid, and the grid is the reason the tally is quick.
- Take the light steel by total run: metres of handrail, metres of bracing, metres of edge angle, each with one measured section standing behind it.
- Take the deck as an area and a sheet thickness, and write beside it whether there is a topping on top of it.
- Note which connections are bolted and which are welded, because a bolted frame may be worth more standing than melted.
Handrail, bracing and edge trim never announce a weight, so this is where the light steel gets its kilograms per metre. It reads slightly low by the fillet and the toes, which for a go or no-go call is the direction you want to be wrong in.
The length of the first leg, measured along the outside of the angle.
The length of the second leg, measured along the outside of the angle.
The uniform thickness of both legs.
Weight per unit length
10.1 lb/ft
Geometry only, and deliberately an underestimate: the heel fillet and radiused toes are excluded, so a rolled angle weighs slightly more than this — proportionally more on light sections. Use the published shapes table when the exact catalogue weight matters.
- Cross-sectional area
- 2.97 in²
They open the calculator with your figures already in it
Steel Angle (L-Shape) Weight Calculator: 10.1 lb/ft — shown in imperial, US market. The link sets both, so the result they see is the one on your screen.
Add the equipment this sizes
This result is a specification — 10.1 lb/ft — not a quantity. Put the thing it sizes into your project: how many, what you call it, and your supplier’s price.
What this calculation does not cover
- Assumes carbon steel at 7850 kg/m³ (490 pcf), and there is no material field to say otherwise. The same L100x100x10 outline is a shade heavier in stainless and about 5.1 kg/m (3.4 lb/ft) in aluminium against 14.9 (10.0 lb/ft) — roughly a third. Weigh aluminium angle with this and every lifting, handling and fixing decision downstream is out by a factor of three.
- Galvanising puts mass back on, and it lands hardest on the light sections. A hot-dip coating runs around 600 g per square metre of surface, and an angle carries a great deal of surface for its weight: about 2 % extra on a 100x100x10, roughly double that on a 40x40x4. On a load bought and craned by weight, that is the opposite correction to the fillets and worth applying alongside them.
- The underestimate holds for a HOT-ROLLED angle and reverses for a formed one. An angle folded from plate on a press brake has no heel fillet at all, only a bend radius that takes metal out of the corner, so this figure runs marginally over rather than under. It matters most when rolled and formed sections are being compared on price by weight.
The deck is what settles it
A composite deck is where a metals estimate goes wrong in the expensive direction. Plain deck screwed down over the secondaries with no topping is simply a great deal of thin galvanised sheet: it lifts quickly, it is bulky out of all proportion to its mass, and it grades light. A composite deck with a structural topping is a different object. The concrete is keyed into the embossments and the sheet is fixed through into shear studs, so separating the two is a processing operation rather than a strip-out operation, and a yard will either price it as contaminated or decline it at the gate.
Turn the deck area into a mass using the one figure in this whole subject that is neither local nor seasonal nor negotiable: steel is taken as 7,850 kilograms per cubic metre in every shapes table you will ever open, which makes a square metre of one-millimetre sheet 7.85 kilograms. A profiled deck weighs that multiplied by its development ratio — the flattened-out width of the sheet divided by the width of floor it covers — because the flutes mean a square metre of floor carries appreciably more than a square metre of flat sheet. The profile drawing or the manufacturer's data sheet states that ratio, and where neither exists, running a tape over the profile across one full rib pitch and dividing by the pitch itself gives it well enough. Do that arithmetic before deciding whether the deck is worth handling as its own stream. On a small mezzanine it comes out as a couple of tonnes of the cheapest grade on the job, which may not repay the segregation. On a large one it is the reason a second stockpile exists at all. And where the topping is staying bonded to it, the deck moves across the sheet entirely: it stops being a metals credit and becomes the densest, heaviest thing you have to dispose of, budgeted against containers rather than against a scrap price.
Putting a number on the tonne
There is no publishable price for scrap steel, and anybody who hands you one is telling you about a different week. Domestic ferrous settles on a monthly rhythm in North America while the export market moves continuously, and both are reported under names worth knowing: the ferrous scrap indices published by Fastmarkets AMM, the assessments from S&P Global Platts, and the London Metal Exchange Steel Scrap CFR Turkey contract, which tends to show which way the export market is leaning before a local yard's offer moves. In the United Kingdom the British Metals Recycling Association is the trade body whose members you will be selling to. None of these is your price. They give you the direction and the order of magnitude; your price is what a named buyer will commit to, for your grade, on your date.
Ask for the quote in the right shape or it is not a quote. Delivered-in to the yard and collected-from-site are two different numbers with a haulage charge sitting between them, and a yard offering to collect is quietly buying your steel at a discount that covers a lorry it owns anyway. Establish the figure per tonne per grade, whether it is fixed at collection or at the moment of tipping, what the minimum economic load is, and specifically what happens to the price if the load is graded down at the gate. A number over the phone with none of that attached will not survive contact with a weighbridge.
Deductions are how an agreed price quietly becomes a different price. Tare and net are the honest ones. Past that sit moisture, dirt, concrete, timber, insulation and any non-metallic passenger that rode in with the steel, taken off by weight or by judgement. Freight, where they collected. Cutting, where pieces exceed the grade's size limit and the yard has to shear them before the pile can be charged. A load arriving clean, cut to length and single-grade attracts none of these, which is the whole commercial argument for doing the preparation on site where you control the labour rate rather than paying somebody else's.
When and how you are paid is regulated in some places and worth knowing before you load. In England and Wales the Scrap Metal Dealers Act 2013 makes it an offence for a dealer to pay for scrap metal in cash: payment runs by bank transfer or cheque, the dealer must hold a licence from the local authority, and they must verify and record the identity of the seller and the vehicle. The Act extends no further than that — Scotland licenses metal dealers under the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982 as amended by the Air Weapons and Licensing (Scotland) Act 2015, and Northern Ireland under its own Scrap Metal Dealers Act (Northern Ireland) 2016, so check which of the three you are actually selling in. A yard offering cash is telling you something about the rest of their compliance. In the United States the same ground is covered state by state, with identification, record-keeping and hold-period requirements on dealers rather than a single national rule.
The arithmetic itself is the least of it — tonnes against a rate per tonne is a multiplication anybody can do standing up. What it is for is the sensitivity. Run it at the price you have been quoted, run it again at the price you would receive if the whole load graded down a step, and compare the gap against your container and haulage costs. If the recovery still funds itself at the lower figure, the decision is made. If it only works at the higher one, you are not making a recovery decision at all; you are taking a position on the scrap market with somebody else's programme.
Your tonnage against a rate you have actually been quoted, not a remembered one — and note that the rate field asks for money per kilogram, so a price agreed per tonne is divided by a thousand on its way in. Run it twice, once at the grade you expect and once at the grade a mixed load would fetch, because the distance between those two answers is the decision.
The total weight of the scrap metal load.
The current price paid per kg for this scrap metal type.
Scrap weight
1,100 lb
Figures that depend on a rate wait for yours — this page does not assume one.
They open the calculator with your figures already in it
Scrap Metal Recycling Value Calculator: 1,100 lb — shown in imperial, US market. The link sets both, so the result they see is the one on your screen.
What this calculation does not cover
- The yard grades the load, not you. Attachments and contamination come off at the scale — insulation still on the cable, plastic and rubber, brackets and fixings, concrete, dirt, oil — either as a deduction against the weight or by dropping the whole load into a lower grade paying a fraction of the rate entered above. A clean sort before it goes on the truck is usually worth more than the difference between two yards' quoted prices.
- This is gross value, and what you keep is what survives getting it there. Cutting and separating time, container or skip hire, the truck and the fuel all come off it, and on a low-value grade such as light iron they can eat the whole figure — which is how a load ends up genuinely worth less than nothing to haul.
- One rate for any quantity. Yards price in tiers and commonly set a minimum weight before the quoted grade rate applies at all, so a small load gets the walk-in price rather than the trade figure quoted for a full container. Enter the rate for the quantity you are actually bringing in, or this reads high on anything small.
Loose steel fills a body long before it loads the axles
Haulage is where a metals plan meets physics that catch out crews who mostly move rubble. Steel is the densest thing on the site, so the instinct says a load of it will be at its weight limit with the body barely covered. Cut obsolete steel behaves nothing like that. Beams stack on their flanges and leave the web space empty, angles nest badly, deck springs back into shape, and a handrail is mostly the air between its posts. A body loaded with mixed strip-out steel is largely void, and it will very often reach the top of the sides while the axles are still comfortable.
Which limit binds decides the vehicle. A tipper suits short, cut, dense material and tips it in one movement; a flatbed with a grab loads itself and takes long sections without cutting them first; a hook-lift and an open container suit a stockpile that fills across a week. What you cannot do is derive the number of movements from tonnage alone. Work in the loose cube — the volume the cut steel genuinely occupies in a heap, several times over the solid volume the same steel occupied as a frame — and divide that by the body being hired. No published loose density for cut mezzanine steel would be right on two consecutive sites, so measure your own: load one body, weigh it, and the ratio is true for your cutting, your loading and your operator for the rest of the job.
Long sections then bring a securing problem that is separate from the weight one. Beams that overhang, angle that slides forward under braking, and a grab-loaded tangle that settles in the first mile all have to be restrained by something better than the driver's optimism. The Load Securing: Vehicle Operator Guidance published by the DVSA in Great Britain, and the lashing calculation method in BS EN 12195-1, are the documents that give adequately secured a meaning. Cutting sections to a length that sits inside the body earns its time here alone, quite apart from what the grade specification says about maximum piece size.
The movement count follows the heap rather than the tonnage, so what goes in is the loose cube the cut steel occupies and not its weight. The bed menu is three standard tipper sizes in whichever measure your haulier quotes, so a roll-on container or a grab lorry is counted by working out how many of those bodies it stands in for.
The total material volume to haul.
The hauling capacity of the truck being used.
Truck loads needed
5 x 12 yd³ loads
Trucks are also limited by legal weight, not just volume — dense materials like gravel or wet soil may reach a truck's weight limit before filling its full volume capacity, requiring more, partial loads.
They open the calculator with your figures already in it
Dump Truck Load Calculator: 5 x 12 yd³ loads — shown in imperial, US market. The link sets both, so the result they see is the one on your screen.
Estimated cost — your price
This site holds no price list for this material — local prices vary too much to publish honestly. Enter your supplier's price and the result is costed with it.
What this calculation does not cover
- This counts volume only. It does not check payload, axle loading or gross vehicle weight, and a body filled with gravel, sand, wet clay or broken concrete normally reaches its legal weight limit before it is full — so dense material takes more trips than the volume count shows. It is not a legal load check; what the truck may legally carry is the hauler's call.
- The figure you enter is treated as loose, as-loaded volume. Excavated soil and demolition debris swell once they are dug out, and delivered fill loses volume once it is compacted in place, so a bank (in-ground) or compacted-in-place quantity entered here undercounts loads. Convert to a loose volume before using this.
- The three bed sizes are generic fleet sizes, not your truck. Rated capacity moves with body length, sideboard height and whether the quoted figure is struck (level) or heaped, and liners, tailgate gear and a worn body all change what actually goes in. Confirm the number with the hauler or rental yard.
- Nothing here covers getting the truck to the material. Site access and turning room, overhead clearance, tipping space, posted road and bridge weight limits, seasonal load restrictions and permits all change how many trips are actually possible, and none of them are modelled.
- One material, one truck type, and no cost. Loads that cannot be mixed — segregated waste streams, separate stockpiles — need their own counts, and haulage rates, tipping fees and disposal charges (often billed by weight or per ticket rather than per load) sit outside this calculation.
What stands between the cut and the weighbridge
Coatings decide whether any of this happens at all, and the first one to establish is what is sprayed on the underside of the beams. On a frame of a certain age that is an asbestos question long before it is a scrap question, and it is answered by a pre-demolition survey rather than by somebody with a torch already lit. Licensed removal under the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 in Great Britain, or under the asbestos provisions of the National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants at 40 CFR Part 61 Subpart M in the United States, comes first; until it is done and documented the steel underneath is not revenue, it is a liability with a market value attached.
Old structural paint is the second coating and it is the one that gets ignored. Torch-cutting or burning steel that carries a lead-based paint puts lead fume directly into the breathing zone of the person holding the torch, and in the United States that work sits squarely inside OSHA's Lead in Construction standard at 29 CFR 1926.62, which treats torch cutting, burning and rivet-busting on lead-coated steel as trigger tasks with presumed exposures until air monitoring says otherwise. Great Britain arrives at the same controls through the Control of Lead at Work Regulations 2002. Nothing about the controls is exotic — ventilation, respiratory protection, washing facilities, and nobody eating where the cutting happens — but they are hours, and hours are what decide whether cutting on site beats paying the yard to shear.
Hot work inside a building that is still partly occupied carries a third cost. A permit, a cleared and screened area, a fire watch held during the work and maintained after it stops, and an extinguisher within reach are what NFPA 51B, Standard for Fire Prevention During Welding, Cutting, and Other Hot Work, describes, with NFPA 241 covering the safeguarding of the wider operation. Where the building is live, the cheaper route is frequently mechanical rather than thermal — a shear on the excavator, a nibbler, or simply taking the frame apart the way it went together. A bolted mezzanine often does come down at the cleats with a rattle gun and some patience, and it comes down without a permit, without fume and without a watch.
One last check happens at the gate and it surprises people every time: radiation. Yards and mills run portal monitors on incoming loads, because a sealed source melted into an electric arc furnace contaminates the melt, the baghouse dust and the building it happened in, and the practice is described in ISO 22188, Monitoring for inadvertent movement and illicit trafficking of radioactive material. On an industrial strip-out the plausible sources are entirely mundane — level and density gauges on process plant, thickness gauges on a line that was pulled out years before your contract started, and the odd smoke detector. A load rejected at the portal does not stay at the yard. It comes back to your site, on your lorry, with the clock running.
Making the two ledgers meet
Before any of it pays anybody, establish who owns it. Title to the arisings is a contract term rather than a custom, and it is not always where the trade assumes: some clients reserve the metals, some expect the recovery value to be visible in your price, and occasionally the mezzanine has already been sold as a mezzanine to a dealer arriving on Tuesday with a spanner set. That last case deserves a genuine look before the torch comes out. A bolted frame in sound condition, on a common grid, with its baseplates intact, is worth a multiple of the same steel sold by the tonne, and it leaves the site on the same lorries.
The instrument for settling all of this while the building is still standing is a pre-demolition audit. BS 6187, Code of practice for full and partial demolition, treats recovery as part of planning rather than as a salvage afterthought, and the European Commission's Guidelines for the waste audits before demolition and renovation works of buildings set out what such an audit is expected to identify. Done properly it produces exactly the list this article has been assembling: what is up there, what grade it will be, what has to come off it first, what it weighs, and who owns it.
Paperwork travels with the metal. Movements off site sit under the waste regime in force — the duty of care in the Environmental Protection Act 1990 and its transfer notes in England and Wales, state and federal requirements elsewhere — and metal can cease to be waste only against defined criteria, which in the European Union and in retained Great Britain law are those of Council Regulation (EU) No 333/2011 establishing criteria determining when certain types of scrap metal cease to be waste, with a statement of conformity for each consignment. The weighbridge ticket is a legal document in its own right: commercial weighing equipment is regulated by NIST Handbook 44 in the United States and by the Weights and Measures Act 1985 and the Non-automatic Weighing Instruments Regulations 2016 in the United Kingdom. Take a ticket showing gross, tare and net, and take one for every load, not for the job.
Then close the loop while the site is still open. Set the tickets against your standing tally mark by mark and see where the two disagree, because a consistent gap in one direction is a lesson about your estimating rather than an argument with the yard — light steel under-counted, deck development forgotten, a grade assumed that the gate did not agree with. Metals recovery is also reported by weight in most diversion schemes, which means a heavy steel recovery flatters a diversion percentage far more than a lorry of segregated plasterboard ever will, and the same tickets serve both purposes. The general answer, on most jobs, is that the beams and columns pay comfortably, the light iron roughly covers its own handling, and what turns the metals line from a credit into a cost is almost never the price of steel. It is a coating, a topping, or somebody tipping two grades into one body.
Answer these before the metals line goes in the tender
Six things that decide whether a strip-out's steel funds its own removal, every one of them knowable while the frame is still standing and none of them dependent on this week's price.
- Who owns the arisings — A contract term, not a custom. Settle whether title passes to you on removal, and whether the client has already sold the frame to a dismantler.
- A mark-by-mark tally, light steel included — Beams and columns from their rolling marks, handrail and bracing from measured sections and total runs, deck from floor area times sheet thickness times the profile's development ratio.
- The grades you will actually produce — Plate and Structural, heavy melting, and light iron come off the same frame. Read the current ReMA circular for the thickness and piece-size limits that separate them.
- Whether the deck has a topping bonded to it — Plain deck is a light metals stream. Composite deck with concrete keyed into the embossments is a disposal cost dressed as steel.
- What is on the steel before it is cut — Sprayed coatings surveyed for asbestos, old paint assessed for lead, and a decision on thermal versus mechanical cutting made from those two answers.
- The loose cube, measured not assumed — Weigh the first loaded body and back-calculate. Cut structural fills a tipper long before it loads its axles, and the movement count follows the heap.
Opens the calculators above on one screen with the dimensions from this article already filled in. Quantities only — this site publishes no price list, because local prices vary too much to publish honestly.