Freeway Guardrails Are Now a Favorite Target of Thieves

Fentanyl and cheap battery powered tools

And as much as that is an issue in itself, gotta love the scrap metal dealers who see someone show up with a shopping trolley full of brass hydrant covers and "sure, no problem here".

When it comes to a lot of metals it is kind of amazing how some of the biggest mines of this stuff are some of the oldest. It makes sense as we go for the low hanging fruit first and they are the biggest deposits.

Alas, as an aggregate, the ratio of overburden on mining has been going up for almost a century now and it is starting to catch up in some materials. Copper, nickle being a big two. Iron... not so much. So far we have managed to 'Red queen' ourselves out of the situation by throwing massive amount of resources (mostly energy), but one does wonder what happens if we even hit an energy plateau. Many have speculated, most are wrong, time will tell.

Its the same thing with catalytic converters. The crackhead stealing a catalytic converter from a 2011 prius is interested in the $150-$350 of platinum in the catalytic converter, not the $2200+labor replacement cost of the thing. Considering that its ~20 minutes looking, and ~2 minutes sawing to steal the thing, we should all be so lucky as to make $150-$350 for less than 30 minutes' work.

A second hand iPhone is only worth a few tens of dollars on the black market, but that's enough for the next hit.

At its peak it was happening every single month, but slowed after it started catching press.

Drop long prison sentences and massive fines on these people, and this problem would vanish in short order.

You must show identification when selling scrap metal, and the scrapyard must record that for a period.

It would be cheaper all round to add a $100 yearly registration fee to every scrapyard, rather than give them an extra compliance burden.

In addition to basically no consequences for US police breaking the law, there are actually zero consequences to them not doing their jobs.

now the tweakers sell directly to scrappers with a business license, that take a 25-50% cut.

About a year back here in Australia, so a wealthy country, my local council had the issue where over night, 500 meters of copper water pipe was stolen over night. Have to admit I was kind of impressed at the scale of it.

What I did find interesting in OP's article was the mention of the US Tariffs. I didn't create the problem but it certainly will accelerate it. Interesting times.

Related: I recently had a few hundred lbs of clean galvanized steel to dispose of and looked into selling to scrap yard. I would have spent more on gas, one way, taking it up there than I’d have gotten for it. Luckily my local recycling yard (2-3mi away) was happy to take it for free. Ironically, I also took a few half-full trash bags of AL cans and got ~$35 for them.

Galvanized steel would increase the hazard by having a higher likelihood of piercing through the shell of the vehicle and striking the passengers than the softer and more bendy aluminum would. It also corrodes over time, so barring an accident aluminum despite its higher initial cost is a better choice of material for guardrails.

Tradeoff is that they would need to make the fines for recyclers so onerous that they would knowingly never accept guardrail material since the only truly effective deterrent is removing the profit motive.

I'd be interested to see what the alleged reason for this is.

While I know that's not what you meant, it sounds like he was fine until emergency services decided to teach him a lesson ;)

Sure, big cities have problems in bad economic times with metal theft, but when every crook is out to steal catalytic converters from cars at people's homes, that's pretty bad.

Macroeconomic and microeconomic cannibalism are further signs of a trend towards decay and decline. Oh and school shootings and mass shootings. And a lack of functional, universal healthcare. It will take far more, like the garbage not being picked up, for major reforms, but it will also take a charismatic leader really on the side of the ordinary people for that to manifest. Another "FDR".