A
Anonymous
Guest
Hello all,
I'm Ben, writing to you from Israel. Recently I'd grown interested in the electronics recycling business. I fear, some might say it is a case of the gold fever.
This may be a bit of a mouthful for a first post but please do bear with me, would be interested in hearing your thoughts.
Firstly I'd like to thank everyone for the wealth of information contributed to this board, it is exceptional and truly one of a kind. A couple of you have received a private message from me, I realize it could have been construed as borderline spam, though gladly I'm not banned which tells me there is a considerable amount of tolerance here. Please consider this an apology.
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E-Scrap can be purchased all over the world, from thousands of various sources of various magnitudes. Mind you, when I think about buying scrap, it is by containerloads of several metric tons, depending on the items in question. At present, I do not intend to process or refine anything myself, but for obvious reasons, understanding the process from A-Z can make the difference between a losing proposition and a profitable venture. Any input, from anyone is welcome.
This brings me here, to you guys. Let us ponder the following hypothetical situation:
"Seller" from country XYZ is touting containers full of motherboards and telecom boards, in a completely mixed fashion, unsorted in any way. We will assume the range of manufacturing years is 1999-2009, with an equal distribution of hardware from each year. On average the hardware is 5 years old and the chips, connectors, pins etc have not been harvested. Needless to say CPUs and memories are not included. Now, without a certain amount of uniformity within this load of scrap, how useful is sampling and assaying approx 10lb of material? To me, such an assay seems futile, and more [honest] information from the seller is essential, but I know very little.
On the other hand, say seller agreed to my offer, and after freight, insurance, theft, processing and refining fees, we arrive at a figure that sits between $2/lb and $3lb. Everything is included in this figure. Let's tip the scale against me and say it ended up costing $3.5/lb. The line between a calculated risk and recklessness is quite fine, but assuming some risk is inevitable, however I'd like to shrink it some. Has anyone here ever processed whole boards ? What can one expect as a return per pound of mixed boards [whole] in $ terms? I see thriftybits will buy mixed boards for $2 but who knows what they are going to do with them? Is it reasonable to assume there will be a $4 return per lb of boards excluding any copper or other metals than gold/silver, leaving a margin of $0.5? How can one turn the guesswork into a calculated risk? There are figures on mobos around the forum claiming 8 to 11oz in just gold per ton of mixed boards, but no mention on how one arrived at those figures.
I know goldsilverpro is providing assay services for a fair price, and I will surely be sending him some components sooner or later, but he mentioned that he's unable to assay whole components, which begs the question of who can assay 5 whole motherboards or whole memory modules and the likes?
Thank you guys
I'm Ben, writing to you from Israel. Recently I'd grown interested in the electronics recycling business. I fear, some might say it is a case of the gold fever.
This may be a bit of a mouthful for a first post but please do bear with me, would be interested in hearing your thoughts.
Firstly I'd like to thank everyone for the wealth of information contributed to this board, it is exceptional and truly one of a kind. A couple of you have received a private message from me, I realize it could have been construed as borderline spam, though gladly I'm not banned which tells me there is a considerable amount of tolerance here. Please consider this an apology.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
E-Scrap can be purchased all over the world, from thousands of various sources of various magnitudes. Mind you, when I think about buying scrap, it is by containerloads of several metric tons, depending on the items in question. At present, I do not intend to process or refine anything myself, but for obvious reasons, understanding the process from A-Z can make the difference between a losing proposition and a profitable venture. Any input, from anyone is welcome.
This brings me here, to you guys. Let us ponder the following hypothetical situation:
"Seller" from country XYZ is touting containers full of motherboards and telecom boards, in a completely mixed fashion, unsorted in any way. We will assume the range of manufacturing years is 1999-2009, with an equal distribution of hardware from each year. On average the hardware is 5 years old and the chips, connectors, pins etc have not been harvested. Needless to say CPUs and memories are not included. Now, without a certain amount of uniformity within this load of scrap, how useful is sampling and assaying approx 10lb of material? To me, such an assay seems futile, and more [honest] information from the seller is essential, but I know very little.
On the other hand, say seller agreed to my offer, and after freight, insurance, theft, processing and refining fees, we arrive at a figure that sits between $2/lb and $3lb. Everything is included in this figure. Let's tip the scale against me and say it ended up costing $3.5/lb. The line between a calculated risk and recklessness is quite fine, but assuming some risk is inevitable, however I'd like to shrink it some. Has anyone here ever processed whole boards ? What can one expect as a return per pound of mixed boards [whole] in $ terms? I see thriftybits will buy mixed boards for $2 but who knows what they are going to do with them? Is it reasonable to assume there will be a $4 return per lb of boards excluding any copper or other metals than gold/silver, leaving a margin of $0.5? How can one turn the guesswork into a calculated risk? There are figures on mobos around the forum claiming 8 to 11oz in just gold per ton of mixed boards, but no mention on how one arrived at those figures.
I know goldsilverpro is providing assay services for a fair price, and I will surely be sending him some components sooner or later, but he mentioned that he's unable to assay whole components, which begs the question of who can assay 5 whole motherboards or whole memory modules and the likes?
Thank you guys
