I know when a lot of you saw the title you rolled your eyes but this is the way I look at it. Keep in mind that this is only my opinion. Scrapping ewaste is only part time for me and I get it all for free. It’s one of the perks of my job.
I’ve seen many threads about hard drives and if it’s worth it to break them down. The same goes for pc power supplies or copper wire you’re thinking about stripping.
When I bring a truck load of ewaste home, it’s a wide variety of things such as computers, data switches, printers, routers, servers, monitors, phone systems, phones and boxes of assorted cables. I will sort through everything and see what can be sold for better than scrap value and the rest is scrapped.
I do pull the power boards from the power supplies and I strip the larger copper wire I get. Hard drive boards are removed but the hard drives are destroyed.
So how long did it take me to break down the power supplies on a load of computers and how much were the power boards and pigtails worth. I could care less! Neither do I care about the time I spent on just the hard drives. I don’t weigh everything or crunch numbers. I look at how much I made on the whole load and I’m never disappointed.
Last week I brought home a box of phones and some copper wire. Yesterday morning I spent about an hour and a half stripping the wire by hand (PITA) and ended up with about 8 pounds of #1 copper.
With the phones, I had to remove the belt clips and the Li Ion batteries. It took 15 minutes to remove those and box them up. I ended up with about 35 pounds of phones at $4.00 a pound and I’m getting $1.30 a pound for the batteries.
Most loads I bring home are a lot larger with more low value items but I still have not ever been disappointed.
Bookmarks