Cable, Grade Information
Household Cable
Unstripped PVC-insulated wiring — twin-and-earth, flex, lighting and ring main cable. The workhorse of UK rewires, generating enormous scrap volumes from social housing upgrades and demolition.
Written by Adam Moffatt · Last reviewed May 2026
Periodic Table Position
What Counts as Household Cable
In trade shorthand "household cable" covers all unstripped, PVC-insulated copper cable up to and including light industrial sizes — typically anything you would rip out of a domestic or commercial property during a rewire. The most common single product is BS 6004 twin-and-earth, the flat grey cable that runs ring mains and lighting circuits in virtually every UK home built since the 1960s. Alongside that you get 3-core flex (the round PVC cable on appliance leads), single-core PVC singles in conduit, immersion heater feeds, central heating wiring, and the smaller sizes of meter tails. Armoured cable is bought separately because it has a steel armouring layer that needs different processing — see our armoured cable page. Data cable (CAT5e, CAT6) is also generally bought separately because the copper content per kilo is much lower. If in doubt, bring it in and the yard will tell you which pile it belongs in.
History — Why PVC Replaced Everything Else
Before the 1950s, UK domestic wiring was insulated with rubber, often vulcanised with sulphur and reinforced with a cotton or paper braid. It was effective when new but degraded badly over decades — older readers will remember pulling out brittle, cracked rubber wiring from inherited houses, the rubber crumbling to powder in your hands. PVC arrived in cable insulation in the late 1940s and was almost universal by 1965. It was cheap to extrude, flame-retardant, mechanically tough, and resisted oils and most solvents. The mass switch to PVC wiring coincided with the post-war housing boom, the rural electrification programme, and the wholesale rebuilding of UK cities. That generation of installations is now 50–70 years old, sometimes still in service, sometimes being pulled out in rewires driven by EPC ratings, kitchen and bathroom refurbishments, and electrical safety inspections under landlord licensing schemes. The volume of household cable arising from current UK rewires is enormous and shows no sign of slowing.
How the Copper Content Determines the Price
Household cable is priced on the assumption of average copper content across a mixed load, typically 35–45% copper by weight. That is the figure recyclers work back from. The other 55–65% is PVC insulation, sometimes a steel earth conductor, sometimes a jute or paper filler in older cable, and any odd terminals or junction box bits that were not removed before stripping. Thicker cable always carries proportionally more copper per metre because the conductor cross-section grows faster than the insulation thickness. A length of 16mm² meter tail is much more copper-rich than the same weight in lighting flex. This is why scrap yards sometimes pay slightly more for separated heavy cable than for a mixed load of light and heavy together — they can grade it accordingly. If you can separate your cable by thickness before bringing it in, you may get a marginally better total. For most domestic loads it is not worth the bother.
Where It Comes From
Domestic rewires are by far the largest source, driven by a combination of consumer unit upgrades, kitchen and bathroom refits, EPC retrofits for landlords, and properties changing hands. Commercial fit-out contractors strip out office cabling when refurbishing floor plates. Demolition contractors clearing properties for redevelopment pull out cable in bulk — entire houses worth of wiring can yield 50–80kg of copper. Telecoms engineers replacing copper twisted-pair with fibre still generate volumes of unstripped PVC cable. Skip operators and waste transfer stations recover cable from mixed loads. Sole-trader electricians often build up a couple of bags between visits to the yard. And a steady trickle comes from homeowners doing their own rewires — usually pre-1990 properties where the original twin-and-earth has reached the end of its safe life.
Don't Burn It — Three Reasons
First, it's illegal. Burning PVC cable to strip insulation is prohibited under the Environmental Protection Act 1990 and the Waste Management Licensing regulations. Burning produces hydrogen chloride gas and dioxins, both of which are seriously toxic to humans and to anyone living nearby. Second, the yard knows. Burnt copper has a distinctive dull, dark, brittle appearance and a slightly sulphurous smell. It is bought at a heavy discount as Number Two or worse, and most reputable UK yards refuse it outright. Third, you make less money. Properly granulated cable recovers 97–99% of the copper value as clean stripped wire, which pays at near-bright copper rates. Burnt cable pays at maybe 60–70% of bright. You lose roughly twice — once to oxidation and once to the discount. If you cannot strip cable by hand and you do not have a mechanical stripper, the right answer is always to sell it unstripped and let the recycler do the job properly.
How It Is Processed
After yard weighing and a quick visual check for contamination, household cable is baled and shipped to a specialist cable processing facility. There it goes through a granulator — a heavy-duty shredder that chops cable down into 5–10mm chunks. The chopped material then runs across a shaking table or through an air classifier that separates the dense copper granules from the lighter PVC fragments by density and airflow. Good granulation lines recover 97–99% of the copper. The copper granules are sold as a graded product to copper smelters and rod mills, where they re-enter the supply chain as new wire and bar. The separated PVC is harder to recycle into anything valuable because mixed-source PVC contains stabilisers and colourants — most of it ends up in secondary PVC compounds for underground ducting, road furniture, or non-critical extrusions, or it goes to energy-from-waste plants. Plastic recovery is the weak link in the cable recycling chain, but the copper side is highly efficient.
Price Trend & Outlook
Household cable prices move almost in lockstep with LME copper, but at a heavily reduced absolute level because of the insulation discount. Between 2021 and 2026 the per-tonne yard price for unstripped cable in the UK has ranged from around £700/t at the lows to over £2,600/t at recent highs. Sterling weakness against the dollar generally pushes UK yard prices up because LME copper is priced in dollars. The longer-term outlook is bullish on copper — electric vehicles, grid upgrades, solar PV installations, and heat pump rollouts all increase the volume of installed copper, which feeds back into scrap volumes years later. As an indicative number, an electrician who saves a tonne of cable over a year (entirely possible on a busy commercial rewire schedule) is looking at the kind of money that pays for a decent holiday. Check today's price →
Note: All scrap yard prices paid by QuickStop Metals are calculated as a percentage of the prevailing LME or spot market price, updated daily. Check today's prices →
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