Do most scrap yards pull printed circuit boards out of equip that is mostly metal?

Originally Posted by rtindall

I would love to hear from a variety of scrap yards on this question: Do printed circuit boards typically get pulled out of equipment before metal portions are sent through a shredder?



I am from Hypertherm, a manufacturer of metal cutting equipment. Our goal is to ensure that by 2020, none of our equipment ends its life in a landfill, and is instead 100% recycled. A lofty goal given that we don’t have much control over our end users, especially 5-30 years after they buy our equipment! My research has shown that most of our end users send our dead equipment to a local scrap yard where ever they are in North America. I believe that this is a great way for our ferrous and non-ferrous components (which make up the vast majority, by weight, of our systems) to be recycled. However, this may not be the best place to ensure that plastic breakage and printed circuit boards are properly recovered. Some of our systems could have 10 pc boards of good value in them, along with hard drives, CPUs, RAM, processors, etc.

I welcome any comments that will help me understand this process. Also ideas on how to get scrap yards to pull the plastic or PC boards out of our systems if they don't already? Or how to incentivize our end users to pull out the PC boards before sticking the rest in the scrap metal bin.
Thanks!!!

Until there is a significant end market and the economics make sense, you won't get a significant amount of plastics to be recovered from the either the shred pile before shredding or the shredder fluff after the shredding process. As for circuit boards, many yards do not understand the value in them. My main yard will only purchase cards with gold fingers. They won't take mother boards, hard drive boards, or CPUs. The mid and low grade boards are the same way. I have even offered to buy them at good prices and they won't do it.

I have read that in the U.K., they are required to recycle 95% of all the material that goes thru the shredder. Don't know how a regulation like this would work in the U.S.