Why thieves love to steal catalytic converters | Hacker News Reader

Why thieves love to steal catalytic converters

thehustle.co

11 pointsrmason9 comments

There used to be a huge problem with people stealing railroad infrastructure and taking it into recycling centers for the cash.

The way this was resolved was by heavily penalizing the purchase of railroad steel. Today, you take in a sizable amount of metal to a recycling center near you, they'll make you sign a bunch of forms that guarantee you are not trading in railroad steel. If you lie on these forms, you are a felon.

It seems that going after the recyclers could fix the problem here as well. If someone is taking in truckload of sawed up catalytic converters, they probably didn't source them through legal means.

Here in South Africa thieves are stealing just more than 3km of copper cable from our national rail service per day. We don't really have the infrastructure (or will) to start going after the people buying it, so it remains a problem.

Also copper/bronze from graveyard markers, empty house plumbing and irrigation backflow valves.

It's not just on the West coast. Catalytic converter thefts have exploded here in Michigan. They're stealing them in broad daylight in Detroit, Flint and Saginaw. Lansing was exempt until two years ago. But now out of state crews came in two years ago and stole a couple of hundred in one summer.

Everyone knows crooked scrapyards are fueling the demand, except perhaps the police.

Why of all the info graphic did they call out the smelter as "illegal". The whole operation is, and it seems weird to single out smelting.

The smelter is the only one that could be legal. The thief is obviously illegal, there's no secondary market for small numbers of catalytic converters except illegally, and decanters are only necessary because what they're doing is with stolen goods. Large smelters do purchase catalytic converters - But they purchase them from scrapyards and handle the sorting and reclamation themselves.

At these prices for the precious metals inside the catalytic converters the thefts will continue to rise.

Yet another reason to like electric cars: no catalytic converter required.

A lot harder to steal pricey materials in a large battery embedded in the frame than a catalytic converter just hanging off the back of an ICE vehicle.

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