Tantalum Resistors

Just food for thought:

It gets messy when you start breaking down the boards. It riles up lead, chromium, and some other nasties as a micro fine dust that you don't see as you're removing components. You breathe in the dust,it gets on your skin, it contaminates your clothes and contaminates your work area. Once that stuff gets in your system it's hard to get rid of it.

It's not like you'll get sick the first time you do it but after awhile the stuff builds up. It's hard for the doctors to diagnose the job related illness because it's such an obscure thing. The medical treatment is expensive.

~ Makes you wonder if the juice is worth the squeeze. ~

It might be better to leave the task of breaking down the boards to the big boys that are set up to do it on an industrial scale and limit oneself to dismantling.

actually they just TALK about gold the most. There is silver, platinum, palladium, gold, copper, and even nickle among other metals in electronics that are recovered. ALL of those add up, but people KNOW gold and they know it's value (nevermind that platinum and palladium prices are not that much less than gold). Gold is the "standard".

The problem is right now for many elements it is cheaper to dig more up than reprocess, but that will not always be the case. They all have some value and you should take that into account when you are looking for say a refiner. I would want a cut and payout for all the metals...really even the plastic has some small value as well.

I recently got a tour of ECS refining a HUGE ewaste recycler here in California.
There is a lot more value in a board than just gold.
I noticed that at the shredded contents of boards they workers were handpicking chunks of copper bearing material out.
They had pallets and pallets of Lithium laptop batteries ready to ship etc etc.
At that volume there is a LOT of money even in the smallest components.
However, I believe no matter what, you are wasting your time breaking itty bitty parts out of boards that prob won;t even weigh a gram each.
Plus the health factor. There is a reason e-waste is classified as haz mat.

Originally Posted by Scrappah

Just food for thought:

It gets messy when you start breaking down the boards. It riles up lead, chromium, and some other nasties as a micro fine dust that you don't see as you're removing components. You breathe in the dust,it gets on your skin, it contaminates your clothes and contaminates your work area. Once that stuff gets in your system it's hard to get rid of it.

It's not like you'll get sick the first time you do it but after awhile the stuff builds up. It's hard for the doctors to diagnose the job related illness because it's such an obscure thing. The medical treatment is expensive.

~ Makes you wonder if the juice is worth the squeeze. ~

It might be better to leave the task of breaking down the boards to the big boys that are set up to do it on an industrial scale and limit oneself to dismantling.

Thank you Scrappah. Knowing what is in circuit boards has always concerned me and that is why I don't depopulate boards. I might pull some transformers off to get better pricing but the rest stays except for eproms.

The tantalum caps are not removed either. I'm just not going to pull those little buggers off for 13 dollars a pound. The time it would take to pull a pound off could be spent boxing up 500 pounds of telecom boards to sell.

I not saying that people shouldn't pull Ta caps or other components......I'm just saying that's not something I do. I remember 3 or 4 years ago I was happy to get a load of printers. I would take them completely apart and get every little motor and piece of wire out of them. When I get a printer now, I pull the side panel off and grab the good boards and the rest goes in the shred pile.

A lot of it was trial & error for me. Tried some of the different methods of depopulating the boards and at the end of it all .... it just didn't seem like it was worth doing. It was nasty work, time consuming, and there wasn't much to show for all of the effort.

I suspect the real value was that the experience taught me how to identify all of the little parts n pieces that are on a board. Wouldn't presume to be a grader, but you can look at a board and have a fairly good idea of whether it's low, mid grade, or higher value depending on what's there.

It was a similar thing with printers. I tried them for awhile but it doesn't work that well here. It's a sixty mile run to the nearest scrap yard with the motors,wire, and stainless steel rods. The boards were worth maybe thirty of forty cents after operating expenses and there was a whole trash bag full of plastic to get rid of afterward. Somebody in the big city that's set up to do plastic recycling could do a better job so i generally take a pass on the printers.

Much as anything though, the value is in the experience and figuring out what things do and don't work for your particular situation.

Originally Posted by RLS0812

Good luck being able to ID these guys in the wild x-x

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On a side note: why does everyone ignore Indium ? That metal is NOT cheap !

Indium - used in lcd screens....I checked into this because it only made sense to recycle the bare screens right? Apparently, it is still cheaper to dig it up (it typically chows up in other metal deposits apparently) than to recycle at this point. That was what I found. I do have a guy that buys the bare screen that would have the liquid in it, but I was getting like .01-.02 a pound for those. They just don't weigh that much once you pull it all apart. I still try to take them if I am going his way, but that just isn't enough to make a special trip there.

anyways, that is what I found. I would hop that changes in the near future and we can have another common item to get paid for.

it is also found in the little black rectanles with abilver stripe and a plus mark, they are about 1/4in by i/2in and also yello/orange with ared stripe. maby some one will post a photo I cant.

Originally Posted by Scrappah

The Vermont law is similar to the one here in Maine. You might want to dig into the particulars. As nearly as i can tell you need to get a recycler permit if you're going to break down computers but there's no fee. It's just a bit of paperwork and data keeping.

Here's the link that gives you the info:

http://dec.vermont.gov/sites/dec/fil...s/RECYCLER.pdf

This one gives you an overall view of the program:

Electronics | Department of Environmental Conservation

This is where it gets interesting ! See ... the state collects an end of life fee when you purchase a new electronics device in the store. The big boy recyclers can collect that fee when they recycle that product. There's been pretty good money in recycling the old bubble back tv's.

If you take a thing like a VCR or a Microwave it costs them more in labor to break it down than they get out of it in scrap. That's why they have to charge for that service. Otherwise ... they would go broke trying to do it.

To be honest, the Vermont system seems confused.It's kinda half of one thing and half of another.

I didn't see a fee either, but I did see a requirement to be either "R2 or E-Stewards certified or for those who qualify, provide a variance to this requirement." That alone can cost thousands of dollars, so I consider this to be worse than a fee.

What I've found so far breaking resistors. Most contain a white ceramic interior.
But many resistors with flat ends have a darker material inside sometimes with a wire coil.
This leads me to believe these are Tantalum. Not all flat ended reistors contain this, but the majority do.
These are taken from 20th century equipment.

The only resistors I know of that use tantalum as their standard resistance film material are the Vishay Dale PATT Series Automotive High Temperature Thin Film resistors although Resistors do have a variety of other PM's use in their construction. Here's some of the more common ones you are likely to come across:



1) Metal Film resistors material is often nickel chrome, but for special applications other alloys are used such as gold with platinum and tantalum nitride can be found
2) Thick and Thin Film resistors start with a grain containing ruthenium oxide paste which is screen printed onto a ceramic substrate. They may have gold plated contacts, silver and/or silver-palladium
3) Network resistors & Array resistors can contain Iridium, Silver, Platinum, Palladium, Rhenium
4) Wirewound Resistors typical use Silver Alloys, Nichrome, Manganin for their resistor wire
5) Potentiometers (aka POT's) are a mixed lot. cheaper ones wil normally not contain any PM's. The higher POT's can contain gold terminals, a gold continuity bar, platinum alloy wiper, stainless steel shaft an brass bushing
6) Resistance Temperature Detector (RTD's) (aka Platinum Resistance Temperature Detector) use the fact that some metals (usually platinum) increase their electrical resistance as they get hotter.
7) Thermistors act in much the same way as RTDs. There are two basic types; Negative Temperature Coefficient (NTC) and Positive Temperature Coefficient (PTC). For NTC’s cobalt, nickel, iron, titanium or manganese are common. For PTC’s barium, strontium or lead titanates are commonly used. NTC & PTC leads can be silver plated copper