"Alan Smithee" wrote in message
news:ebY7f.315791$tl2.133473@pd7tw3no...
I've been ripping out a lot of old plumbing in the last little while and
now
I've got a couple of dozen elbows with various lengths of pipe in them.
What
should I do with this stuff? I've thought of trying to reclaim the elbows
by
sweating the pieces apart but it seems like a lot of work. I can't bear
the
thought of sending it to the landfill. And I don't know if it would pay
for
the gas required to drive it to a scrapyard either, but maybe that's the
way
to go. Any ideas or projects that use old copper plumbing? Thx.

There is likely a recycling yard not too far from you. I wouldn't look at it
a "would it pay for the gas" argument. Copper is a finite resource, much
rarer than iron, steel, and aluminum, and should not be tossed, just for
conservation reasons alone, not to mention that in a landfill environment
copper salts leach out of landfill, potentially poisoning groundwater
reservoirs. Further, copper scrap can be melted into new products with a
fraction of the energy needed to produce the metal from ores.
I keep a big box of sawn up copper and brass trash. Once it gets fairly
heavy, I take it to my local recycler.