# "High Grade"



## Aristo (Jun 1, 2016)

I have seen many posts and many individuals refer to scrap circuit boards or other precious bearing materials with the connotation of "high yield" or "high grade" or "super high yield" etc.Many of you in the electronic waste business will have seen this many times and might have even used these terms. We hear things like " there's a lot of gold in those boards or chips" or again, "those pins are thickly plated".

These are all very leading or misleading terms and generally are used to promote a particular agenda. Unless these terms are relative to some standard, they are meaningless.
For the purpose of this forum, I strongly suggest the discouraging of such terms as people may be misled and ultimately be hurt in their business endeavors. Absolute numbers or proven assays should be used where possible and in other cases, a relative comparison to a known standard.
For example, if there is a reference to telecom circuit boards, instead of saying "high yielding boards", the assayed value should be purported or we can say these boards will likely yield better than PC mother boards...and so on.

Recently on this forum, there was a description of some telecom boards as high yield. Relative to PC boards, they might be. Relative to hundreds of other grades, they are absolutely not high grade.In my personal experiences, I have seen boards assay as low as $1.97/lb and as high as $348/lb. Au at an average of $1400/oz....

There are a lot of people reading these forums, both qualified and unqualified, and I would like to encourage caution with respect to references and terminology.


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## FrugalRefiner (Jun 1, 2016)

A good point, well made Aristo!

Dave


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## Barren Realms 007 (Jun 1, 2016)

Only experience will teach you this.


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## patnor1011 (Jun 1, 2016)

I call it ebay slang. All the high grade mill spec and such... :mrgreen:


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## Findm-Keepm (Jun 1, 2016)

+1 to Aristo's comments - well versed!

Add "mil-spec plating" to the above. I always ask what spec? US DoD? UK MoD? Nigerian Defense Ministry? :roll: 

Most making that claim in the US are unfamiliar with US DoD MIL-C-45204 and it's variants. Lots of variance in plating thickness....and some in gold purity.

Just because the military might have used it, does not make it mil-spec. In the early 90s, most mil-specs were tossed in favor of Commercial Off-the Shelf (COTS), and zero Mil specs were used in the manufacture of that - perhaps an industry spec (UL, CE, ISO, etc), but not a mil-spec.

Cheers,


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## silversaddle1 (Jun 1, 2016)

Well what will the buyers and refiners call them then? Several of my buyers have a "High Grade" classification of boards.


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## Smack (Jun 2, 2016)

I agree, good points Aristo. I too have noticed such things but just shake my head and move on.


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## solar_plasma (Jun 2, 2016)

I always understood it as highly relative. What is a big car? Well to me my beloved S211 MB E320CDI station car is a big car, expensive to drive, for everyone who drives off-road or american pick-ups would define it as a cheap, little, sweet vehicle for his wife.

High yielding....compared to what?! In escrap often everything over 3g/kg is high yielding to me. But also this is different from kind to kind. For CPUs everything higher than the yield of intel pentium1 per piece is high yield in my world.

But ok, there is no need to use those terms. I just do not see a problem either. I never sell anything, though, especially not calling it high grade. 

And as long as the pro's are using those terms, I will go on using them.


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## necromancer (Jun 2, 2016)

as time goes on the high grade is still high grade, it just has less gold in it !!

i speak from the electronics side of things, i have always called the better PM producing scrap "high grade" and i have been in the electronics business longer then i have been a member here on the GRF.

all persons i know & have dealt with over the years also call it high / low grade or "gold bearing", it may be a regional term, or may not.

its the same as not all fishermen call the same fish by the same name.


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## solar_plasma (Jun 2, 2016)

Thinking more over it...
low grade - not worth spending time
medium grade - nothing that is great fun
high grade - a pleasure to look at and to learn more about
...my definition

@necro
You're spot on!


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## upcyclist (Jun 2, 2016)

Aristo makes a good point, and that's tied to why so many posts have replies of "let us know your final yield". 

But it's also something that will always get used to some extent--miners may also speak of "high-grade ore". If you want to sell properly, you'll avoid it or define it somewhat. The rest of the time, it's one of those things that aren't necessarily worth the time to parse out. If a new guy says "I'm processing high-grade mil-spec telecom scrap", I don't really care on the definitions of those terms, because the answers are the same: learn more, test, track yields, use proven methods, etc.


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## Geo (Jun 2, 2016)

The term "high grade" is subjective when it comes to precious metals. Which is more desirable, a scrap with low gold content that is easy to process or scrap with more gold content that is difficult to recover. Gold ore from the ground that produces an ounce of gold from one tonne is considered very high grade ore. A tonne of ore is about a square yard of crushed or milled material. I consider gold scrap in relation to work needed to recover the gold. I consider IC chips as the true high grade electronic scrap. Of course there is gold plated pins and ceramic CPU's but really, how often do we do large lots of this material? IC chips are plentiful and every PCB has some. You really have to keep in mind about the material as a whole. We see the boards, we seldom see the mountain of whole units needed for the boards. We see the IC chips, we seldom see the mountain of boards needed for the chips. It is a rendering down from tons of Escrap to the couple of hundred pounds of "high grade" scrap.


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