Precious Metals in Scrap?

tcmtech said:

As someone who gets a measurable amount of his annual income from scrapping anything and everything that has anything of value in it I can assure you rule one of salvage work is don't nit pick the details of whats worth what on the small scale.

Volume is what counts and what makes anything profitable. Picking up old pop cans and soup cans out of the trash for their aluminum and steel value is pointless unless you can get them by the box loads from restaurants and bars.

That goes just the same with electronics as well. Stripping a single or even a few TVs or computers for the copper, aluminum, steel, and trace precious metals is a pointless waste of time but stripping a few hundred is where it becomes rather profitable and thats only where going after the precious metals becomes justifiable.

Regarding EPA and other regulatory agencies. Don't ask and don't tell and if you can get chemicals on eBay on the cheap that more than counts too.

Personally I will take Sceads annual income on a bet! No charities will be involved either. Just me and my bank account. (And maybe a U-tube video of me laughing as I walk into the bank with his paychecks.)

Click to expand...

You must have piles of stuff in your yard.

You must have piles of stuff in your yard.

Click to expand...

I have about 6 - 8 tons of mostly prepared #2 iron but the market just dropped off so bad the last few weeks I will be holding it until next spring. I also have about one tote box (64 Cu Ft) of aluminum ready and I cashed in roughly 400 - 500 pounds of copper this year while it was still up in the $2.50 - $3.00 a pound range.

I also have a few buckets of brass ready now too but since the prices of everything are less than 1/3 of what they where at the peak last summer the rest of my junk is going to sit until next year.

I don't even want to mention how many boxes of salvaged circuit boards and electronics devices I have boxed up now but lets say I have several 5 gallon buckets of capacitors and multi hundred amp transistors, IGBT blocks, rectifiers, and SCR's out in the shop now.

tcmtech said:

I don't even want to mention how many boxes of salvaged circuit boards and electronics devices I have boxed up now but lets say I have several 5 gallon buckets of capacitors and multi hundred amp transistors, IGBT blocks, rectifiers, and SCR's out in the shop now.

Click to expand...

Dang! What I wouldn't give to get my hands on some of those!

I'm thinking of starting on a solid state, audio-modulated tesla coil, but those require loads of high-power FETs.

Where do you get that much scrap from TCM?

i doubt he would say where from!!! i know i am gonna keep my sources close to my chest .
anyway scead i am waiting to hear the figures for profit etc?

pc mother boards!! come off it, this is what i was saying about changeing the goals. ewast by default should include mobile phones and ANY pcb's OR components. as for metals recovered i will help you again here and only go for 2 metals gold and copper. so how much margin do i have to make then? 20% over and above cost

Click to expand...

This thread was started about precious metals and that was the point that I found ridiculous. Gold, silver, palladium, copper is a semi precious metal.

Where do you get that much scrap from TCM?

Click to expand...

Well living out in a rural farming community has its advantages. Most of the iron comes from scraping out old equipment that I pick up on trades or at auctions for cheap, real cheap. Some of its is just old junk others don't want so I haul it out for them and keep the good pieces and the rest gets chopped up and put in the scrap pile.

The aluminum and stuff gets pulled off of motors, engines, commercial electronics, and what ever else has it. The copper mostly comes from old electric motors, wiring, and cables I pick up while doing service work for people. Same with the high powered electronics components stuff.

It pays to have a buddy who owns a salvage yard and needs his equipment worked on often! You never know when your next job might net you a pickup load of electric motors and big VFD units or even a complete running fire truck. https://www.electro-tech-online.com...toy-1962-international-190-fire-truck.122678/

When I pull the fire body off it I will probably get about 3 - 4 tons of steel and maybe a hundred pounds of brass which will be worth as much as the labor I traded for the whole truck!

Largely its the turning old junk into usefull equipment that brings in the assorted scrap. I use what I can and recycle the rest!

Sceadwian said:

This thread was started about precious metals and that was the point that I found ridiculous. Gold, silver, palladium, copper is a semi precious metal.

Click to expand...

starting to sound like aserious wiggle out ok lets go for just precious metal ,GOLD,PALLADIUM,PLATINUM,SILVER. lets be fair tho as the question origanaly was to do with E Waste so i take that to mean any form of electronic waste, mobile phones there batteries laptops there batteries pc's etc etc. but i cant make any plans without some figures from you.........
@TCMTECH
i am surprised scrap falling so much there! seems to be on the increase here, again tho like your neck of the woods always seems to drop back a little come winter. we tend to scrap and strip most of our old equipment rather than auction it. i think more would round here if they realised what scrap can fetch with a bit of work with the gas axe! few years back when new regs came in and animal water supply had to be changed from copper (and lead wich round here was common!!) to the new ugly blue poly pipe we used to go give neighbours a hand for free to remove the old pipeing and help 'CART' away the rubbish shocking what you can get from that kinda quantity of copper pipe . i probally wont be rushing so much to help change the poly pipe when the time comes . farms are a treasure trove for scavenegrs! never seen a fire engine in one tho (not unless theres been a fire).
i did however get my fordson major out of a mates barn and restored her to full glory

Sceadwian said:

The problem is there is no value given to the amount of precious metals that are in a motherboard... The assumptions made have no basis in science and have since that period of time become a tiny fraction of what they were. There's no point to start a calculation from aside from wild guess and random assumptions.

TCM's link to scrap prices of various E-waste items is about the best you could get and a solid chunk of that is from re-use of components not the raw metals price.

Click to expand...

It's an annual amount, no need for numbers per individual mother board, since no analysis will ever be done that way anyway. The assumptions are actually valid, unless you have verifiable data that says otherwise, and why do I have serious doubts about that??? The precious metals have always been used as sparingly as possible. Physics dictates the minimum amounts, and we've already shown calculations about what can be expected in electronic devices.

TCM's link only shows raw prices, not material recovery value of the various substances.


Here's an interesting fact, from an article posted earlier:

“One metric ton (t) of electronic scrap from personal computers (PC’s) contains more gold than that recovered from 17 t of gold ore. In 1998, the amount of gold recovered from electronic scrap in the United States was equivalent to that recovered from more than 2 million metric tons (Mt) of gold ore and waste.29

Click to expand...

The reference was from the USGS

And this:

“A ton of used mobile phones, for example – or approximately 6,000 handsets (a tiny fraction of today's 1 billion annual production) ‐‐ contains about 3.5 kilograms of silver, 340 grams of gold, 140 grams of palladium, and 130 kg of copper, according to StEP. The average mobile phone battery contains another 3.5 grams of copper. Combined value: over US $15,000 at today's prices.”

Click to expand...

DerStrom8 said:

After doing some research, I agree with duffy. You can probably get more money by simply selling the boards or components alone, or repairing them.

Click to expand...

What you're saying is true. However, there comes a time when electronic boards are so obsolete, they no longer have any value as a repair or salvage. That's when recovery comes into play. I have heard all kinds of blather about how much it must cost, and so forth, and yet have not seen anyone post a reasonable analysis to prove it.