scrapping has helped me make ends meet many times, too busy with cash work to bother right now,and so is everbody else localy, and I have to haul scrap out of the shop and find someone who will let me dump it, which then takes me to one of my favorite backwoods pirates(my term), where often is to found some rather improbable stuff that gets scrapped and junked and rendered, or sometimes rescued and taken on as a project.
Copper, bronze, brass, platinum from catelitic converters, stainless steel, and aluminum can all bring in significant amounts of cash, as will the shear mass of a row of stripped down bulldozers or cement trucks.
The larger operations are otherworldly, the scale aproaching a complete landscape exposing the inner workings of our industrial civilization, where a car can be taken from a complete and in many cases drivable state, to having its mechanicals ripped out by a modified excavator and the rest shredded into fist sized backened chunks, in 5 minuits, all the plastic and glass and other stuff ground into a paste(loose change, lost phones,tools,junk, etc,etc,etc) containerised for shipping for further rendering.
And the cast of characters that casualy fit into a chaotic apocaliptic sceen, that will also have an incongrous and often large office building where some tiny patch of non destruction, and maybe some flowers demarks the boundry where order is re established, and the highest value materials are stored, and money , always cash for sellers, is exchanged.
Which leads to the experiences of going to such places and the very hightened, edgy awareness of bieng someone new showing up, and the relationships that grow , vs the other side of my life interacting with various proffesionals, academics, business people, bankers, lawyers, etc and just how uncomfortable they often are, though beurocrats, those bastard children of academia are invisible, lives wholely contained within buildings and behind barriers, therin to steep in whatever miasma of guilt at the horrors they tend, creates.
In case anyone was curious about where the economy is right now.
When this was happening in the early 90s in Eastern Europe, it was much easier to laugh at eh