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Following on from our previous research on recyclable material collectors abroad and on “scrap dealers” in Paris suburbs, this portfolio comes from interviews conducted in Istanbul between 2014 and 2024. It focuses on the continuum that links informal recyclers to formal wholesalers, particularly those of scrap metal, via intermediaries who contribute through their sorting and dismantling work to these market circulations. The portfolio highlights a historical, economic and social loop: in search of “iron workers”, we met workshop owners belonging to the Roma community of Istanbul whose know-how in the metal trades is ancestral. These workshops source semi-finished metal materials from factories. They produce their secondary raw material in part thanks to scrap metal wholesalers supplied by the informal recovery sector. The workshops themselves generate waste which reenters the recycling loop. Everything works thanks to the socio-professional networks which allowed us to go from one to the other: the wholesalers, often former toplayıcılar (waste-pickers), are here the essential link in the informal-formal continuum of these scrap metal circulations.