A national electronics and auto parts manufacturer was being paid local prices for material that was worth more than local buyers would pay for it. Outlast found the buyers who price on quality, made the economics transparent, and ran the containers.
It didn't make sense to have a full time scrap hire. As a result, the manufacturer was being paid a number that had never been tested.
The arrangement was a hauler rebate: a single buyer, a single rate, renewed by default. It had gone unchallenged for six years. That isn't unusual, scrap sits between operations and finance, owned by neither, and a rebate that arrives on schedule doesn't generate the kind of question that produces a review.
What made it durable was the absence of a comparison. Scrap prices move daily by alloy, by geography, and by chemistry. Without visibility into all three, one buyer's offer isn't a data point you can evaluate. It's just the number.
The plant's aluminum came off the line as mixed-alloy drops. Sold that way, the whole volume prices to its least valuable component — the buyer isn't paying for what's in the mix, they're paying for what they'd have to assume about it.
The material was consistently better than the price it commanded. Nothing about it was hidden. It simply wasn't characterized, and uncharacterized material gets valued conservatively by whoever is buying it.
A single buyer relationship with no benchmark to test it against
Mixed-alloy material priced at its lowest common grade rather than its actual content
Revenue reported as one monthly figure, with no tonnage or alloy detail behind it
No visibility into what the same material was worth in other markets
Logistics complexity as the practical barrier to selling anywhere further afield
Scrap prices move daily by alloy, by geography, and by chemistry. Without visibility into all three, one buyer's offer isn't a data point you can evaluate. It's just the number.
Three things, none of which happened inside the plant: the material got characterized, the buyer set got rebuilt, and the economics became visible.
Outlast profiled the material across a full production cycle then sorted the mixed-alloy drops to spec rather than selling them as a blend. Recovery rose 41% on that change alone.
This is the least glamorous part of the engagement and the most consequential. Sorting doesn't require new technology; it requires knowing what the market pays for each fraction, which is a knowledge problem rather than an equipment problem.
An extensive network survey matched the manufacturer's specific scrap profile against the outlets that actually value it. The result moved 92% of tonnage to mills rather than secondary brokers — one less margin event between the plant and the end consumer of the material, and a buyer who prices on chemistry because chemistry is what they're buying.
Pricing shifted to transparent cost-plus. The manufacturer sees the sale price and sees the cost of reaching it, which is also what made accurate revenue reporting possible across both new and existing streams.
Profile the material: sampling across a full production cycle to characterize grade, form, and contamination.
Sort to spec: separating mixed-alloy drops so each fraction prices to its own value rather than the lowest common grade.
Survey the network: matching the specific scrap profile against outlets whose specifications it genuinely serves.
Place with mills: direct to end consumers where possible, removing an intermediary margin.
Run the containers:containerized logistics managed end to end, with no coordination burden retained by the plant.
Report transparently: cost-plus pricing with visible economics, and revenue reporting across every stream
The facility needed reliable, cost-efficient secondary metals. Outlast built the sourcing, testing, blending, warehousing, and logistics operation under a success-fee-aligned contract.
The OEM was managing dozens of regional destruction vendors across the US for high-value, IP-sensitive end-of-life equipment, with no scalable verification system or auditable proof that destruction had actually been completed.