We buy cable from demolition and teardown

Demolition cable does not arrive in categories. A single roll-off can hold building wire, feeder, tray cable, control, communications and bare copper, all cut, all dirty, all mixed with the brackets and straps that held it up. That is normal and it is not a problem, provided everyone knows it up front.

What we need is a picture of the whole load and a sense of the schedule. A demolition lot is reviewed on recovery value far more often than on reuse, and the sorting question, on site or at the yard, decides how much of the load can be separated before it is weighed.

What a mixed teardown load actually contains

Building wire from the branch circuits, feeder from the service rooms, tray and control cable from the mechanical spaces, communications cable from the risers and bare copper from the grounding system. Add busbar, breakers, panels and the occasional roll of unused wire that was left in a closet.

List the categories you can see and estimate the share of each. A load that is mostly building wire reviews differently from one that is mostly feeder. If there is clean unused material in the pile, pull it out first, because it does not belong in a demolition review at all.

Sorting on site against sorting at the yard

Sorting at the source produces a better outcome. Copper, aluminum, armoured cable, bare conductor and communications separated into their own boxes takes an hour with two people and changes the review from a mixed estimate to a set of counts. It also removes the guesswork about what is under the top layer.

Where the schedule will not allow it, say so and send photographs of the load as it stands, from several angles and after the top layer is pulled back. A yard sort is possible but it takes time, and a lot quoted without anyone seeing the bottom of the box is quoted conservatively.

Cut ends, crushed armour and contaminated debris

Demolition cable is cut, and cut ends are fine. What is not fine is cable that has been crushed, burned, or mixed with debris that should not travel. Crushed MC armour, cable full of broken straps, and anything that has been sitting in a wet basement for years all reduce what a load can be reviewed as.

One point needs care. Where a building has asbestos-containing material, cable pulled through that debris has to be handled under the site's abatement plan, by the people qualified to do it. Cable that has been in contact with that debris is not something we will ask anyone to sort through.

Older office and retail property inside the loop comes down or guts out regularly, and each job produces a mixed load from risers, service rooms and ceiling plenums. Downtown and along the older commercial strips, the loading window is short and the street is usually the constraint.

Industrial teardowns east and south of the city are larger and slower, with roll-off boxes staged on a slab and a genie lift available. Those sites are easier to sort on, and a load assembled over several weeks can be reviewed in stages rather than all at once.