Trading Manager Dany Drummond isn’t the sort of person you’d expect would work in a scrap yard. A sparky 20-something who joined SITA as a graduate four years ago, she’s about as far removed from the clichéd image of a metal merchant as you can get. “The biggest misconception is that we’re all dodgy, that it’s all like Steptoe and Son”, she laughs. “I’m from Shropshire originally so when I got the job I was quite trepidatious – ‘Oh my God I’m going to be in London working with scrap metal people!’ But actually, day by day you see how it is all a legitimate operation. The stuff you read in the papers... I feel quite isolated from that. That’s not me.”

It’s not SITA either, and as you’d expect its Hayes metal recycling site lies very much at the respectable end of the scrap business. It’s one of eight metal facilities the group has around the UK, and each year trades around 12,000 tonnes of predominantly non-ferrous material or what Drummond describes as ‘bitty things’ – aluminium wheels, copper wiring, brass taps, etc.

Her day begins at 8.30am when her boss phones through the latest figures from the London Metal Exchange (LME). This has a direct bearing on how much is paid out at the front gate. “He’ll tell me that copper is worth, say, 5078 on the LME. That doesn’t really mean anything because that’s just trading paper, but it filters down to what people want to pay for it. When my boss rings up India and asks ‘What do you want to pay for brass today?’ – that’s actually the figure that we’ll get for the brass today.”

Everyone knows that metal prices are high at the moment, though actually they are lower than they were during the peak of the boom around 2007-08. Most of this is as a result of the huge demand from China, India and other developing economies.

The Hayes plant collects the supply that meets that demand. The facility tends to have two main types of customer. There are VAT customers – other metal recyclers, builders, etc – and domestic customers who might have just cleared out their garage or carried out a conversion. These latter types account for just 15 per cent of Hayes’s purchases, but are still very much valued by Drummond. “You get a few people who come in clutching cans and foil, which they’ve kept not because of the value but because they know it’s going to get recycled. I love that. I really want to look after them when they come in.”

With the other 85 per cent, what happens first is that the load will come over the weighbridge, or if it’s a lighter load taken to smaller scales. Next, the customer’s details are recorded and photo ID is checked. SITA is moving to a cashless system, so soon all payments will be processed either by bank transfer or BACS. This is to prevent any chance of stolen metal getting into the system, something that up until recently Drummond had to keep a sharp eye out for. “It’s something you get to know”, she smiles. “If someone has a brass plaque then that’s obviously not from their garden – you just know that’s been stolen. And we all know our cable. We have our booklet and we have to study them.

“Generally, though, I’d say we don’t see it here. People who steal metal know where to take it, so they know not to come here, ’cause the first thing we ask for is photo ID.”

The metal weighed, it’s then taken into the depot, separated and stored in a series of loading bays. Being a predominantly non-ferrous scrap yard, Hayes tends to receive metal that’s small in scale, so very little processing is done on site – any material that needs shredding is taken to SITA’s plant at Lenwade near Norwich. The one exception is a mechanised ‘nibbler’ that cuts copper piping into more compact shapes. Adjacent to this is a pile of copper, and behind that a huge mound of various types of cable – electrician’s cable and what is known as CAT 5 cable, which is used primarily for ethernet or modem connections. The cable, Drummond explains, will in all likelihood end up in China where it will be stripped and reused (one hopes), whilst the copper tends to go to Europe – Germany mainly.

She guides us to the next bay, a mound of what is known as aluminium ‘turnings’. These are scraps from manufacturing that are collected and taken to the Lenwade site where they are shredded and eventually exported to Indonesia. To their right lies a pile of aluminium wheels. These are apparently waiting to be cleaned. “That’s a really tedious job. They have to be done one by one with a hammer and a chisel. The boys hate that job.”

We pass by other piles of ‘gun metal’, a higher grade brass that has more copper in it, fire alarm cable, aluminium litho – used primarily in the printing industry – and lead. In the corner a worker loads waste onto a forklift, which will be shredded and converted into refuse-derived fuel (RDF) and eventually exported to Sweden.

The site doesn’t look very busy this morning, but Drummond is confident it will liven up later on. “It’s very, very seasonal. Yesterday we had 40 people come in. Over the year it’s probably an average of 60. It depends on how much metal is lying around, which in turn depends on how much demolition is going on. If the construction industry is not doing very well then the metal industry doesn’t do very well. It all depends on the economy.”

Other than meeting customers, the rest of Drummond’s day is spent in the office where the trading is done. “I’ll send out a price list to particular merchants so they know how much, say, brass is today and from that what I’m willing to pay for it. At the same time there are people like EMR and Sims, our other two big competitors, who do the same. So we’re up against them if we are going to purchase that material. That’s what happens during the day. You get phone calls all day saying ‘I’ve got four tonnes of this, 25 tonnes of that’. What are you going to pay for it?’ Then they’ll ring all the others and there’s a kind of bidding war to buy the metal.

“The downside is the LME being so volatile. [Copper] went down £100 yesterday so if I bought copper yesterday it’s lost £100 in value already. That’s a massive challenge. You’re so scared of what’s going to happen next and you can’t really speculate on this kind of market because there’s so much risk.” As she speaks, you can see another truckload approaching the weighbridge. Looking around the site, you start to get a sense of the bigger picture, the role this plant plays in the global market. Hayes is one of the links in a supply chain that connects the metal in that truck or metal from someone’s bathroom to a new development in China. It’s a world that Steptoe and Son would have found barely conceivable.