Recycling old computers today

About 5 yrs ago I went to an auction for tools and they had this pile of old computers and no one would bid on them so they threw them in with something I was bidding on and won so I had to take them home. I stacked them up in the barn hoping to find someone to take them but no luck so finally I'm fed up with them being in the way so I found a place locally that pays 45 cents a pound for the complete computer. They will take monitors but don't pay for them. I have around 25 so hopefully I'll make a little change. I'll post this afternoon how it goes.

You will get quite a bit of copper and aluminum from the monitors. You are losing money if you give them the monitors no charge. Also as far as the towers go, there is copper and aluminum in there also not to mention the mother boards which can be sold by the pound.

Originally Posted by Rich

You will get quite a bit of copper and aluminum from the monitors. You are losing money if you give them the monitors no charge. Also as far as the towers go, there is copper and aluminum in there also not to mention the mother boards which can be sold by the pound.

Rich said it. As far as the monitors go, you don't have to pull those apart if you dont want to, but you should definitely pull out the RAM, the CPU, and the wire out of the computers! These things are valuable, and can be sold online for much more than 45¢ a pound.

The motherboards are selling for close to $2.50 per pound on ebay right now. Check out ebay here

Also for more info on electronics scrap check this out

Good Luck. Either way you will be making money from something you hadn't planned on buying!

I understand your point and if i had more time it would be a good exercise to see just how cost effective it is to piece them out. The downfall I see is the bulk of the weight will become worth 8 to 10 cents per lb on the computers and with the monitors I'll have to deal with getting rid of the crt's and plastic. I'm leaving for the recycler soon, I'll post when I get back.

definitely pull the CPUs out.

Can't do anything different now. I had 571 lb got a check for $257 I'm very pleased although I'll be wondering now if I should have stripped them out. If I would have pulled the cpu's the price per lb would have been lower so I'll just deposit my check and be happy.

What did you buy these computers along with? Seems like you had a whole lot of them, did you pay much?

They came from a John Deere dealership, the largest dealer bought out all the smaller ones in the area and closed down a few. I wasn't doing any scrapping at the time, probably missed some good buys. I bought an engine stand, injector pop off stand and some shelving. They threw the computers in with the engine stand. Most of them had a tag indicating they were for training purposes.

Well, the guy that paid you $257 didn't just do it to make you feel good. He is going to make some money on it or he wouldn't pay that much for it.