Aluminum Calculator – Calculate the Material Value of Aluminum
Material Value · Aluminium
2.75 €
1,000.00 g × 1 × 0.0027 €/g = 2.75 €
Buy-back price: The amount a dealer or refinery actually pays. This is typically 2–10% below the melt value, as processing costs and margin are deducted.
Aluminum is condensed electricity
Aluminum does not occur in nature as a metal, but bound in bauxite. It can only be extracted by electrolysis, and that takes a great deal of energy — so much that smelters are located where electricity is cheap: at hydropower plants in Norway and Canada, at coal-fired power stations in China.
That is why the aluminum price reacts to energy costs more strongly than other industrial metals. When electricity prices rise in Europe, smelters are throttled or shut down, and supply falls. Anyone reading the price trend should keep energy prices in mind: they explain movements that do not follow from demand alone.
Conversely, a shut-down smelter is hard to start up again. The metal in the electrolysis cells solidifies, and restarting costs time and money. Supply outages therefore have a longer effect with aluminum than with metals whose production is easy to ramp up and down.
Recycling changes the calculation
Melting down aluminum takes only a fraction of the energy needed to extract it from bauxite. The metal does not lose its properties in the process — a can can become a can again. The share of secondary metal in supply is correspondingly high.
For you as a seller, this means: scrap aluminum has real value, unlike many other materials. A buyer pays for it because he saves energy.
The catch lies in sorting. Aluminum is almost never processed pure, but as an alloy with silicon, magnesium, copper or zinc — depending on the use. An engine block, a window frame and a drinks can are made of different alloys, and they cannot simply be melted together.
Why the purchase price differs
The exchange price applies to primary aluminum of a defined purity, traded in tonnes. Scrap aluminum is neither pure nor available in tonnes: it is painted, anodised, joined with steel screws or bonded to plastic as a composite material.
That is why a buyer asks about the grade. Bare profiles fetch more than mixed household scrap, and whatever is glass and fittings on a window frame, he deducts. We deliberately give no percentages for this — they depend on grade, region and buyer, and a figure we cannot substantiate would be misleading at this point.
Ask the buyer about the classification and the deduction. He should be able to put a figure on both, and the material value calculated here gives you the yardstick against which to measure his offer.