There are several types of brass in the eyes of recyclers. Yellow and red are the two most common with red being worth more than yellow. But many of them downgrade the price for cartridge cases because so much of the weight is lost in shipping - they can leak out of the containers in which they are shipped much more easily than sink faucets, for example.
Upon retirement in 2008, I spent three years in the non-ferrous metal recycling business running a buying station for a friend. Wow, some of the stuff that was brought in! Shotgun primers that were believed to be brass (they're mostly steel), faucets that actually were brass-plated, co-ax TV cable that is mostly plastic ("low-grade copper wire" as opposed to more valuable "insulated copper wire") and the list could go on.
One time, an older gent brought in a window air conditioner. I told him that if he stripped it down to its various metals it would be worth a lot more as I had to buy the whole unit for its weight in its least valuable metal, which was steel. He declined and accepted $6 for the air conditioner. I set it aside for the next rainy day (they usually were slow) as I wanted to see just what that difference would be. That small air conditioner, when dissembled to the same weight in #1 copper, #2 copper, insulated copper wire, copper/aluminum cores and steel (if I'm not forgetting any) would have paid that man $56!
With brass cartridge cases, it pays to shop around. The huge recycling plant to which we sold our metals by the ton downgraded them to us so we had to pass that along to our customers. All the other plants within reasonable trucking distance of south-central Pennsylvania did as well so we had no alternative but in other parts of the country, that's not the case (yet).
Ed
