Metal theft is "the theft of items for the value of their constituent metals". It usually increases when worldwide prices for scrap metal rise, as has happened dramatically due to rapid industrialization in India and China. The metals most commonly stolen are copper, aluminium, brass, and bronze.
The defining characteristic of metal theft (besides being limited to items containing or made entirely from metal) is the motivation for the theft. Whereas other items are generally stolen for their intrinsic value (e.g., stealing an iPod for its value as an iPod), metal items are stolen for their more or less extrinsic value as raw material or commodities. Items are ultimately scrapped, or recycled, to provide material for making new products.
The rise of metal theft, surprisingly, has not encouraged exploitation of old landfill sites for metal.
Read more about Metal Theft: Motivations For Theft
Famous quotes containing the words metal and/or theft:
“We are supposed to be the children of Seth; but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilisation.”
—Anthony Burgess (b. 1917)
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
—Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969)