Ask a plant manager what their scrap is worth and the honest answer is usually a shrug. The material leaves the gate, a payment arrives some weeks later, and nobody reconciles the two. That gap is not fraud. It is the absence of a process — and it has four usual locations.
1. The weighbridge gap
The most expensive number in a scrap transaction is the weight, and in most plants nobody from the generator's side watches it get recorded. The load is weighed at the buyer's yard, the figure comes back on a slip, and there is no independent record to check it against. Even a small percentage difference, repeated monthly, adds up to a meaningful annual number. The fix is not distrust — it is presence: weigh at your own bridge where you have one, or send a representative, or insist that the load sheet is countersigned on site before the vehicle leaves.
2. Mixed-load pricing
A single ferrous load can hold turnings, sheet cuttings, structural offcuts and stray non-ferrous pieces — four materials with four different market rates. Sold as one 'mixed scrap' lot, all four get priced at roughly the rate of the cheapest. The same happens with plastics: rigid HDPE, stretch film and woven PP sacks are not one commodity. Segregating at source costs a bin and a habit; it changes the realisation per tonne more than any negotiation will.
3. Paperwork that does not exist until the audit
The quantity that left your gate, the quantity your buyer recorded, and the quantity your EPR return reports should be the same number. In practice they are three numbers reconstructed months apart from memory and bank entries. A load sheet issued at the time of lifting — category, weight, vehicle, date, signature — turns that reconstruction into a lookup. It costs nothing and it is the single document an auditor actually wants.
4. A payment date nobody wrote down
'Payment will come' is not a commitment. Without a date agreed at quotation, scrap receivables drift to whatever the buyer's cash cycle allows, and the generator has no basis to follow up. Writing the date into the rate confirmation makes the receivable a real one — trackable, ageable and chaseable like any other.
What to do this month
You do not need a system to close these gaps; you need three numbers reported monthly: tonnes by category, rate by category, and days from lifting to payment. Once somebody owns those three numbers, the leaks become visible — and visible leaks get fixed.