A case for truck-mounted Escrap processing plants?

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scwiers

Well-known member
Joined
Mar 31, 2008
Messages
73
Location
Michigan
Hi GRF,

In my years of collecting escrap as a hobby, taking o ut fingers and CPUs, and hauling the remaining PCB to the local yard—where I get paid for it, or not—it strikes me just how upside down and inefficient the escrap recycling business is, generally.

Since few yards actually do their own PCB processing, from what I gather, it can be weeks or months before yards get paid for their tons of material, especially if it’s being shipped across the Atlantic to Boliden or Umicore, during which time volatility in the markets can cut already slim margins for smaller players. (And a local yard I know here in the upper Midwest, deals with those companies exclusively.)

One of the biggest problems in the industry, as I see it, is in determining the *value* of a consignment—be it a few hundred pounds of high-end material, or cargo-container loads of lower-value stuff. Most yards just determine a payout price, determined by the margin that they can get from their brokers, who in turn deal with the smelters and refiners. From my experience, most yards determine *value* based on a table of values, like boardsort.com does. I call this model the BACKEND model of valuation of a consignment, because *values* are ultimately determined only after refining (on the backend), with all of the middlemen having to adjust their expected margins, upfront, accordingly.

It’s inefficient because there are several middlemen seeking to hedge the market, with incomplete knowledge of the material they are trading.

My proposal is to do what has been suggested before—but never successfully implemented: to design a fleet of MOBILE PROCESSING UNITS (MPUs) which could take PCB and process it on-site, cleanly and efficiently. This would allow more-or-less exact determination of values on the FRONT END, before the smaller yards dealt with the network of middlemen. Metal recovered on site can be immediately subject to XRF and fire assay, allowing operators to know exactly the composition of their material. I take my cue from the youtubes of the Chinese system, where de-soldered boards are crushed and have metals electrostatically separated.

Please have a look at my post in the Patent section of the GRF site.
 
Your idea/theory does not change from being paid on the "back end" to being paid on the "front end"

You are simply "trying" to change how many people are in the middle between the front end & the back end

No matter how you do it - at the front end - you need to take "raw" product in --- in the middle that raw product needs to be processed in order to --- on the back end have a finished product

So - at best - you MAY be able hedge profit to your advantage between in take (up front) product cost & out put (back end) finished product by getting rid of some (or all) of the middle men

in other words - the real question here is --- how much is an "up front" investment going to cost you to get rid of those middle men - AND - on the front end of raw product coming in can you produce enough finished product on the back end - to pay for the investment you will need to make to get rid of those middle men --- which needs to be paid off before you start to see a "real profit" --- which means you don't see a "real profit till the VERY back end of paying that investment off

And don't forget there are operating cost in the middle of all that

Edit to add; - not saying it can't be done - it's a question of the whole picture with all the holes needing filled in

Kurt
 
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