Scrap is a term usually used to describe waste metal. Old, unwanted metal such as parts of vehicles, building supplies, and surplus materials, are taken to a breaker’s yard, where they are processed for later melting into new products.

A scrap yard (also known as a breaker's yard), depending on its location, sometimes allow customers to browse their lot and purchase items before they are sent to the smelters although many scrap yards that deal in large quantities of scrap usually do not, often selling entire units such as engines or machinery by weight with no regard to their functional status. At some yards customers may be required to supply all of their own tools and labor to extract parts, and some scrapyards may first require waiving liability for personal injury before entering. While others may stockpile as may easily removed parts as possible in order to add to the return value of the scrapped vehicle. Many scrap yards also sell bulk metals (stainless steel, etc) by weight, often at prices substantially below the retail purchasing costs of similar pieces, and can be a gold mine of sorts. This could lead to the proverb, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”.

In contrast to a breaker’s, scrap yards typically sell everything by weight, rather than by item. To the scrap yard, the primary value of the scrap is what the smelter will give them for it, rather than the value of whatever shape the metal may be in. An auto wrecker, on the other hand, would price the exact same scrap based on what the item does, regardless of what it weighs. Typically, if a wrecker can not sell something above the value of the metal in it, they would then take it to the scrapyard and sell it by weight. Equipment containing parts of various metals can often be purchased at a price below that of either of the metals, due to saving the scrapyard the labor of separating the metals before shipping them to be recycled.

Any person carrying out a business as a scrap metal dealer in the borough needs to register with the council's Trading Standards service.

Aluminium is produced from bauxite, a clay-like ore that is rich in aluminium compounds. The aluminium is only found as a compound called alumina, which is a hard material consisting of aluminium combined with oxygen. This alumina has to be stripped of its oxygen in order to free the aluminium. The alumina is dissolved in a molten salt at a reduction plant and a powerful electric current is run though the liquid to separate the aluminium from the oxygen. This process uses large quantities of energy.

Recycling 1kg of aluminium saves up to 6kg of bauxite, 4kg of chemical products and 14 kWh of electricity.

Recycling aluminium requires only 5% of the energy and produces only 5% of the CO2 emissions as compared with primary production and reduces the waste going to landfill. Aluminium can be recycled indefinitely, as reprocessing does not damage its structure. Aluminium is also the most cost-effective material to recycle.

Steel is also mined from an ore. Iron ore is plentiful but it too is usually combined with oxygen or sometimes carbon or sulphur. The iron ore is stripped in a blast furnace to reduce it to pig iron that can then be used in steel production.