With scrap bronze fetching up to $1.70 per pound, thieves are making your plaques a target.
While you can’t totally stop criminal activity, you can make your valuables a less tempting target by installing plaques from Atlas Signs and Plaques. While the price of foundry-cast bronze plaques is often over $450 per square foot, plaques from Atlas can be under $150 per square foot. The key is that plaques from Atlas look foundry-cast, but they are not. Atlas Plaques are created from a space-age man made material, and then coated with real metal that has all of the characteristics of the cast plaque, but at a much lower cost. Result is that thieves get something that even the most unscrupulous scrap dealer won’t buy. That is if they steal it at all. If they do steal or vandalize your plaques, replacement will be far less expensive.
Here is another idea for important plaques. Have Atlas create a replacement for your original, hang the Atlas plaque, and place the original in safe storage until the allure of this crime is reduced.
The news is currently awash in stories of the theft of any scrap metal of value. Thieves are stripping aluminum siding and gutters, copper wire, and brass and bronze plaques and turning them into cash to fuel their addictions. Abandoned homes, businesses, cemeteries, pumping stations, parks, government buildings, churches, bridges, and historic sites are tempting targets. Thieves are even stripping occupied dwellings passing up entertainment devices to strip the copper wire and plumbing. It must be easier to sell and harder to trace. But the best targets are plaques because they are heavy for their size and usually easy to remove.
We hate the concept of accepting crime and having to remove temptation to protect assets, but think of it having the last laugh by outwitting the criminals.