Stainless is the metal people misjudge in both directions. Some assume anything shiny and rust-free is worth a fortune. Others write it off as steel and put a $400 sink in the mixed bin.
Both are wrong, and the gap between them is bigger than most people expect. Good 316 can pay four or five times what low-grade stainless does. Same shine, same lack of rust, wildly different cheque.
Here’s how to tell what you’ve got.
You’re paying for the nickel, not the polish
Stainless is iron with chromium in it, which is where the corrosion resistance comes from. But chromium is cheap. What a yard is really buying is the nickel.
Grade 304, the everyday stuff, runs about 8 to 10% nickel. Grade 316 adds molybdenum and pushes nickel to 10 to 14%. Grade 430 has almost none. That single number explains nearly the whole price ladder.
It also explains why stainless has been flat lately while copper went on a tear. Nickel was trading around US$16,150 a tonne on 16 September 2026, up only about 4.6% on the year. Copper over the same period was up close to 40%. If you’ve been sitting on a pile of stainless waiting for the market to run, it hasn’t, and there’s no particular sign it’s about to.
The magnet test, but backwards
Everywhere else in the yard, a magnet sticking means cheap. With stainless, it means cheap for a different reason, and the logic catches people out.
Grades 304 and 316 are non-magnetic, or weakly magnetic at most. A fridge magnet will either fall off or hang on limply. Grade 430 grabs hard, the way mild steel does, because it has no nickel to speak of.
So: magnet slides off, you’re probably holding the good stuff. Magnet sticks firmly; you’re at the bottom of the stainless ladder.
One wrinkle worth knowing. Cold-worked 304 — anything that’s been heavily pressed, bent or spun, like a sink bowl or a deep-drawn pot — can go slightly magnetic at the worked edges. A weak pull on a sink rim doesn’t mean it’s 430. Test a flat, undisturbed section.
Read the stamp before you guess
Plenty of stainless tells you what it is if you look. Check undersides, back panels, the inside of cabinet doors, the flat of a sheet near the edge. You’re looking for 304, 316, 18/8, 18/10 or SUS304 stamped or etched into the metal.
Failing that, context does a decent job. Commercial kitchen gear, benches, splashbacks and food processing equipment are usually 304. Marine hardware, coastal balustrades, pharmaceutical and medical equipment lean toward 316, because that’s what salt and chemicals demand. Appliance panels, auto trim, lift doors and washing machine drums are typically 430.
Yards with an XRF gun can settle it in seconds. Ask.
Grades and indicative rates
Ranges below come from Australian rates published between May and June 2026. Melbourne yards more often quote a single headline band of roughly $0.70 to $2.00/kg, which tends to reflect 304 and mixed material rather than the premium grades. Ballpark only — ring for today’s rate.
| Grade | Indicative range | Where it turns up |
| 316 / 316L | $3.00 – $4.50/kg | Marine fittings, chemical and medical gear |
| 304 / 304L | $1.50 – $2.50/kg | Kitchens, tanks, general fabrication |
| Mixed stainless | $0.80 – $1.20/kg | Unsorted or contaminated loads |
| 200 series / 430 | $0.70 – $1.10/kg | Appliance panels, trim, drums |
Look at the top and bottom of that table. Sorting 316 out of a mixed load can more than triple its rate. Very little else you can do in an afternoon pays like that.
Commercial kitchen strip-outs are the big one
Most of the serious stainless in Melbourne comes out of pubs, cafes and commercial kitchens, and those jobs hide a trap.
The benchtop is 304. The legs and understructure might be too, or they might be galvanised mild steel with a stainless skin. Cool room panels are stainless sheet bonded to polyurethane foam, and that foam has to come off before anyone pays stainless money for it. Dishwashers and combi ovens are stainless shells wrapped around motors, wiring, control boards and insulation.
None of that makes the job not worth doing. It just means the load needs pulling apart rather than tipping into one bin, and it’s usually better handled as a commercial job with the sorting priced in.
What quietly costs you
Grease and food residue. This is the one people underestimate. An unwashed kitchen bench isn’t just unpleasant; it’s weight the yard can’t sell and a load that might get downgraded on sight.
Mild steel frames, brackets and fixings left attached. Rubber seals and gaskets. Foam backing on panels. Oil and coolant on machining offcuts. Chemical residue in tanks, which is a safety question before it’s a pricing one — tell the yard what was in it.
And mixing grades. A bin with 316 fittings, 304 sheet and 430 trim all together gets priced as mixed, which is to say it gets priced near the bottom.
Sorting, in order of what it’s worth
Pull the 316 out first, if there’s any in the job. Biggest gain, least effort.
Then run the magnet over everything else and put the strong-stickers in their own pile. That’s your 430, and mixing it into the 304 drags the whole lot down.
Then strip the obvious mild steel, rubber and foam.
Then, if it came out of the kitchen, hose it off.
Ask which grade you’re being quoted on before you load the ute. A rate with no grade attached isn’t a quote; it’s a number.
Johnny Metal Recycling buys stainless steel in all grades, from a single sink to full kitchen and factory strip-outs, with collection across Melbourne.