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greggorywiley

New member
Joined
May 16, 2015
Messages
1
I have been running a laptop repair business for three years. I have trash bag full of different circuit boards and I also have a stack of dead laptops, a box of ram and a lot of hard rives and different things. What would be the best approach for removing the precious metals from them all. Is that enough recyclables to make it worth the process or should I just try to sell what I have?
 
Welcome to the forum Greggory.
All the answers to your questions are here and for free, take the guided tour and pay special attention to the safety section.
You may hope to find an easy answer but it doesn't exist, recovery and refining is one very big specialised science, you can do it but it takes a lot of reading and study. If that doesn't float your boat simply trade your scrap, nothing wrong with that, we have members who do just that and very successfully.
If you expect fortunes from this exploit give in, if you want to learn and have fun read on.
 
your description of exactly what you have is vague.
you may want to take a read through the forum, start with the safety section.

there is many posts that you will find helpful that will explain which parts you may want to start with and some that can be resold as scrap, some components will be more advanced for you to recover the metals from.

not sure of your basic location, it will always help others in helping you in starting your quest.
there are members from many parts of the world here, depending on your location may depend on the answers you would get.

if you wish to sell parts as scrap or for reuse.
i sell non usable parts like:

laptop batteries
memory (ram)
whole hard drives
main boards (mother boards / logic boards / telecom boards....)
wire (of different grades)
metals (steel, aluminium, old solder... and others)
scrap tantalum capacitors
multi layered ceramic capacitors (MLCC)

and much more

some parts you may want to keep 8)

do some reading & don't be afraid to ask about the true names of the things you may want to search for.

good luck & enjoy !!
 
To get an idea of how much in value you have, take a look at http://boardsort.com/payout.php
They recycle commercially so there is more values than that in the scrap, but they are doing it at a scale that lets them process it cheaply. If you do it your self then you have to factor in the price of chemicals, labor, equipment, safety, dealing with wastes and the fact that you can never get all of the values. Most of us also makes mistakes in the beginning and loses some of our gold.

If you're in for the money, sell it to one of our members or to Boardsort. If you want to explore a new and exciting hobby, read on!

But I must warn you, if you decide to refine your scrap into shiny gold you could get hooked, it is addictive to see that golden button in the end. 8)

Göran
 
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