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Can we do anything with these at all? I’ve been tossing them into scrap metal but wondering if anyone else found something to do with these capacitors?

Good ones can be reused or sold

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I put them in aluminum but the yard I go to doesn’t pay as much attention to detail as I would if I were them. .45lb last week.

I’ll make no judgement and leave it at this—assuming you don’t understand the consequences.

Intentionally adding stuff to the wrong category hurts the industry.
Yes the vast majority of canister capacitors are aluminium. But also cardboard and plastic and oils and carbon. Not to mention the silver or steel or nickel contacts and others components.
One of three things happens here.
1–If it’s a small yard they load up Gaylords in bulk. Sell them to a larger company who after years of working together grabs the Gaylord by the pallet with a lift truck and dumps it into a feed pile. Which is totally unmanned and feeds into a shredder.
2–shreds on site and sends the contaminated load to a refiner
3–shreds the load on site and sends the contaminated materials to an overseas production company that melts (not refines) the shred into casings for electric car batteries that fail to contain the electrical issues in the battery and allow it to bust into flame melting all 5 passengers into a non-recoverable goo of post car that must now become low grade steel meetings bodies and all.

If long posted here, elsewhere, everywhere: if you care about more than just profit never mess with the classing. It destroys the entire system.

Most larger recyclers will buy canisters as oil filled hydraulics ($0.22-ish) or electrical ballast ($0.18-$0.24) today’s pricing


Every bad melt lowers prices globally. 10 Troy pounds of under valued gold dropped the international gold value 2% in less than 24 hours and creates a major mistrust. One company not paying attention…

I’ve seen such issues with copper, aluminium, brass…! Please, just don’t do it. It’s a quick gain to game the system but everyone pays the price

Believe me the moment a scrap yard gets on the bad side of the man/woman above them, the buy prices drop

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I have mixed feelings about capacitors. My yards have a sign saying they don't buy capacitors, but they accept items with the capacitors still in place in them. I did find business that bought them as much as 8 bucks a pound, but they wanted 40000 pound loads, and I assumed this was something other than the simple aluminum type I usually encounter.
So Lost, you cautioned us on what could happen if material is in the wrong category, but I didn't see any real suggestions on what to do with them

Most scrap yards don't want capacitors because they used to contain PCBs. No, not printed circuit boards, polychlorinated biphenyls, banned in 1979.

Capacitors can still be scrap, just make sure you aren't trying to get paid for them as like 6061 or 6063, etc. cause if they get into that scrap then that's when it becomes the problem Lost described.

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Here to learn more so I can recycle more
My grades are my own opinion and not an official grade from Boardsort

The solution, if available, is to find a yard that will take them. If you get paid it’s pennies.

The worst case scenario is put them in curb side bins. No they don’t get recycled and no they don’t cause issues.
This is highly controversial though.

The highly powerful magnets used to pull steel don’t pick them up. Laser sensors used to sort out plastic automatically done pick them up. They don’t clear the eddy blower that sorts aluminium cans. And humans pulling the paper and remaining aluminium off a belt are going to ignore them.

So along with thousands of loose bottle caps and shredded paper they wind up as ‘trash’ that actually, usually, gets heat compressed and used as fuel cells that are burnt with the exhaust being heavily sorted and treated.
It’s better than dumping them in the trash or damaging a less resorted stream.

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My point in my epic monologue was that my primary steel buyer super sorts and then shreds on site. He also buys presort from smaller recyclers. Having this capacitors slip in won’t be noticed until post melt pour. The final product.
One tiny capacitor isn’t going to hurt anything. But if everyone does it we all lose.

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I found that the little ones are not worth a time of day, but the big ones are worth cutting the aluminum out of if they are not oil filed just be sure to use PPE as some of the stuff in them is nasty.

Well I certainly didn’t expect my comment to lead to all this, although discussion is learning. I would like to clarify my scenario.
1. I live in Mississippi. There are only 2 yards within 20 miles of my. Their buy list is about 10 items. Only one of them is aluminum. I have even asked and they say “aluminum is aluminum”. I asked them one time about magnetic stainless and he said “if it’s magnetic, it ain’t stainless” One of the yards is cleaner, more organized and pays way more. I use them.
2. I’m am not purposefully cheating to increase profits. I have a full time job and do this as a hobby for extra cash and because I was tired of watching things with visible gold and plastic and batteries etc go to the land fill. I get 95 % of my material in exchange for free labor to remove it. Corporate America wants their remote facilities to be green but don’t provide the means. They do hold the budgets to a strict line so when an IT manager wants to do the right thing and calls the closest e waste recycler that he can find on the internet, some corporate guy says yeah we can haul that off for 5000$, the It guy says no thanks and lets it sit a while. In a few years there’s a room full of crap. They love it when I say free labor and assure them it will all be properly recycled. I promise you The tunica county land fill has more gold in it than the Hoffmans ever mined.
3. I have learned a whole lot from lost and this forum and I love it.the only capacitors I ever have are small ones I pop off of mother boards and gfc’s so that I can get far more boards in the box which is in and of itself, good for the environment. I honestly never thought about or realized that they weren’t mostly aluminum. I also assumed, which is my fault, that a huge industry had some process to deal with everything they receive, not just shred it and melt it.

I think I had other things to say but this is the longest post I ever made and now I don’t remember them. And no I don’t have ADD. It’s late and I’m old. Thanks