Originally Posted by
Spooky 2
I have seen mini smelters right on the teardown sight so it must have some significant value.
Most aerospace aluminium specifications call for around 10% of the charge for a melting furnace to be scrap, and most of this will be runaround scrap in the plant making the ingots/plate/extrusions. 2xxx alloys will have a Zn maximum of <0,2wt% so if you melt an aeroplane down you can't really use the resultant alloy for 2xxx ingot production. Most likely the scrap will be used for casting alloys where the specifications are significantly more relaxed.