help needed...

[stevem4323]

hi guys ...love this site and have learnt so much i run a computer recycling company in birmingham england and we collect computers ,printers all the usual kit....we sell on all our scrap to refiners...but things are about to change we sell our motherboards ,ram ,cards ,and processors for pm recovery to a refiner but i believe with a little bit of investment and a bit of the right information from the right people we can refine it ourselves....why not we get an endless supply of the stuff and why should some other company make a mint out of us...so over the next few weeks i will be picking your brains and reading a lot more on here ...so any information will be greatly appreciated
i am in the process of looking for a good shredding machine
thanks steve

 

[martyn111]

Cherry pick it all for visible gold (fingers, north south chips, cpu's etc) and then sell the rest to your refiners, processing the whole boards is way beyond what you are going to be able to do without huge investment in processing machinery, polution control during incineration, waste disposal, etc, etc

 

[stevem4323]

thanks martyn ....do the boards need to be incinerated cant they be shredded and ground up then all the metals be seperated from the plastics ...this was the road i was looking to go down

 

[martyn111]

incineration is the route the big players appear to use, then producing dore bars which are sent to copper refiners for electrical parting and refining of slimes to recover / refine the PM's

 

[Harold_V]

cant they be shredded and ground up then all the metals be seperated from the plastics ...this was the road i was looking to go down

What you were looking to do may not be to your advantage. Everything (including the plastics) will have value once shredded. The concept of separating the metals is nice, just not reality. Extremely fine particles of values will be well dispersed within the plastics, and will not be easily separated mechanically.

Harold