Hobbyist E-Waste Enthusiast - Chattanooga, TN

So I'm super intrigued by e-waste. I love watching videos of people repairing vintage electronics and others things. Planning to teach myself how to solder and maybe do custom builds from reused electronic components. I'm not sure if this is the best place for these questions, but there seems to be a lot of traffic here, so it looks like a good place to start.

It's highly unlikely that I will ever accumulate enough scrap to really make it worth my while to sell boards and such for money. I enjoy the tear down process immensely and can sit for several hours breaking stuff down to their uttermost and separating all the different metals. My first batch of breakdowns were a half dozen printers they were throwing away at work and some random boxes of cables and a few junk hard drives. I had a blast. Now I have a small bucket full of various boards, probably mostly low and mid grade, but a few high grade. Some are pretty old.

Does anyone have any links to any electronic hobbyist forums where I might be able to more finely tune what I'm doing?

If I go the route of depopulating the boards (undecided), what do I do with the board? Tin shred? or are they still considered low grade even with a lot of the components missing? I've heard of some people shredding them and putting them in leaching vats to get all the metals, but I don't think I'm interested in doing much chemistry. Especially with a toddler around.



Can the ABS plastic go into typical plastic recycling? One thing I've definitely determined by starting this hobby is that I want to recycle as much of what I breakdown as possible and keep it out of the landfill.

Can anyone in the Chattanooga area recommend a scrap yard? I'll have a fair bit of steel and aluminum built up.

Printers are probably the worst e-waste items to dismantle. They're dirty and low in metals (unless they're the larger ones or the copier type ones). The boards are you'll get are probably not enough valuable to ship them to the specialized buyers and are probably good for shred after you pull everything you want to save or sell apart. Ewaste is a hard niche, just check out the recent threads.

Originally Posted by CopperMiner

Printers are probably the worst e-waste items to dismantle. They're dirty and low in metals (unless they're the larger ones or the copier type ones). The boards are you'll get are probably not enough valuable to ship them to the specialized buyers and are probably good for shred after you pull everything you want to save or sell apart. Ewaste is a hard niche, just check out the recent threads.

haha, I am 100% uncertain that you even read my post with that response