I have read news reports about thieves stealing cat converters from parked vehicles and selling them to recyclers for cash, so they obviously have some value. To replace a stolen converter it might cost hundreds of dollars for an exact match or a bit over $100 for a generic.
The wrecking yards told me that it was against Federal law to sell used cat converters off wrecked vehicles to consumers, with a HUGE fine. So it was just about impossible to cheaply replace a bad converter. With one older, low value car I had, I ended up breaking up the plugged ceramic inside the converter case, removing the ceramic and then replacing the case in the exhaust system. I live outside the area that requires inspection, so I didn"t worry about the fact that it probably would not pass. Legal? Nope, but that car only ran about 10k more miles anyway.
A catalytic converter does have a small amount of platinum and maybe other rare expensive metal in it. That metal can be recovered and reused whatever it is needed, but I would guess the recovery process is quite involved, and only practical on a large scale. So it probably should go to a recycler that can sell it to a company that has a system to recover the rare metal. There is only so much of those rare metals available, so it probably should be recovered rather than just sending it to a landfill somewhere.
I would suggest trying to sell the converter to a wrecking yard or recycling center. I would not expect to get a lot for it--maybe $10-$20. Or maybe they would not give me anything. If so, I would just leave it there and hope that it would eventually be properly processed.
I try to recycle things I don"t need or want, just to get rid of them. Newspapers, magazines, old batteries and whatnot. It just seems like the right thing to do. I do keep a bunch of scrap metal, since sometimes I have found uses for it.
But I don"t think I would ever need an old catalytic converter! Good luck!
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Today's Featured Article - An Old-Time Tractor Demonstration - by Kim Pratt. Sam was born in rural Kansas in 1926. His dad was a hard-working farmer and the children worked hard everyday to help ends meet. In the rural area he grew up in, the highlight of the week was Saturday when many people took a break from their work to go to town. It was on one such Saturday in the early 1940's when Sam was 16 years old that he ended up in Dennison, Kansas to watch a demonstration of a new tractor being put on by a local dealer. It was an Allis-Chalmers tractor dealership,
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