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.
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.