Why do motor windings pay less per kg than the same weight of clean copper wire?
Short answer: Motor windings are copper wire, but they come wound around and often bonded to an iron or steel core with varnish coating, so a buyer weighing the whole motor is paying scrap-mixed-metal rates until the copper is actually separated from the steel laminations — the copper itself is valuable, but the "motor" as delivered isn't pure copper.
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List Free →What’s actually in a motor
An electric motor’s windings are genuine copper wire, but they’re wrapped around a steel or iron core — the stator and rotor laminations — and coated in an insulating varnish. None of that steel or varnish is copper, and it usually weighs more than the copper wire itself.
Why buyers price the whole motor lower
Unless you’ve pulled the copper windings out yourself, a buyer is weighing steel, copper, and varnish together and pricing conservatively for the mixed content — they don’t know your exact copper yield without either testing or doing the teardown themselves.
What improves the price
Pulling the windings out of the core, even roughly, and selling the copper separately from the steel laminations typically gets you meaningfully more combined than selling the whole motor as one mixed item, if you have the time and tools to do it.
How ScrapTrade Makes This Easier
Listing “copper motor windings, pulled” separately from “steel motor cores” on ScrapTrade lets each material get priced by buyers who actually want that specific input, rather than a blended motor-scrap rate.
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