Home Forums Reloading Bullet Casting Lead prices

What's up with the price of lead? I looked at Roto-metals and the prices are 2,3, and 4 times the going rate over spot price. Good grief that's an incredible rip off. What's going on with that kind of scalping? Why is lead selling at $3 and 4$ per pound on the retail?

No idea, the metal recycling place near me is paying $0.03 per pound for tire weights...

They are probably figuring little to no lead in the bucket so they are paying "shredded steel" prices. (At least I think that is what they used to call it here.) I used to sort a couple of buckets and then take the steel/zinc to the yard just to have a place to dispose of it. They paid me the steel price, then proceeded to dump the bucket into the scrap lead bin.

If that was to be the fate of my steel/zinc scrap wheelweights, I'll dump them in the neighbor's bushes before letting the scrapyard bozos contaminate the lead supply.

Any lead, tin or antimony mines near you? Smelters? Me neither…

Cheap lead? Roofing contractors, plumbers, tire stores.

Actually yes. I live in one of the richest silver/lead mining districts in the world. There's an 30ft wide vein of sulfides next to the highway. I live on an old mine property.

Think the price could be from smelters closing

I'm not aware of any domestic smelters. El Paso, Doe Run, East Helena, and Bunker Hill are all shut down. There probably is one in Mexico and there's one in Trail, B.C.

Locally we have 2 lead silver mines producing though and Red Dog mine in Alaska is producing but much of this goes to the Asian market.

When I saw pbcastco was down to just over $2 a pound shipped for range scrap, I had them send me 66+ pounds. That's down from about $3 a pound about 6 months back.

I have a standing order at the scrap yards around here for lead and haven't ever received a call, so I'm having it delivered. I got into casting a few years too late. All the states around me banned lead wheel weights and there's nothing out there to reclaim.

I sell my lead at $2 a pound and people batch about that price

Spot or trading market price on lead hovers around $1 per pound. Can't figure why the selling market is 200, 300 and 350% more than market price

Price wise the lead is the cheap part of Rotometals price . It's processing it to purity then alloying it with tin and / or antimony that makes it spendy. 1 st you get rid of all domestic smelting so it becomes a foreign monopoly then they charge what they want for it. The more expensive it is the less you shoot and that is really the aim of the left who have been engineering "toxic lead" for years. Build and use your own recyclable backstop to recover your lead to recast it that simple.

All scrap is high, number 1 copper is 4.00 a pound.