Hello Everyone, I am Marie from Alabama

I am a newbie escrap recycler. AL has practicaly no regulations for scrapping so that means no good sorces for donating or selling either.Lots of stuff just goes off the dirt roads and then I pick it up. I have been selling cans for years and started selling copper and alum a few years ago. I have a thrift store so lots of donations of electronics and tvs is what has prompted me to ecycle. I would like to turn my escraping into a profitable business just not sure what to keep and how to sort it all. Any guidance and buyer suggestions welcome. I am a mature lady, , with 18 head of horses & ponies to feed along with the rest of the farm animals. I am really learning a lot from the posts I have read, thank you all for the helpful info.

Welcome Marie I'm from Alabama also. I'm north of Birmingham where are you located?

I'm an escrapper myself but I do IT work for a living and just help my customers clean up old junk and try and make a few bucks myself.

Hi Craasher, I am in Northport, just across the river from Tuscaloosa and the Univ of AL. I am retired and started my thrift store. So much electronics stuff was coming in had to start ecycling. Now that people know about me, it comes in regular. I am a little overwhelmed with what to collect and how to sort for best sellability. And how do you dispose of monitors and crts.

Hi Marie and welcome!! You will find tons of information here, a lot of it is learn as you go lol but you'll do fine! Nice to meet you!

Hello Marie, welcome to SMF! After you get the copper out, your local Goodwill might take the picture tubes, just put them back in the plastic cases ( there's several threads about that here). You should be able to do well between a thrift store and ewaste recycling. Older things make good as well as newer ones lots of times. Did you know Bob Weston?

What is your thrift store's name?

Search through some of the old posts on each topic and you will start learning about the different grades of boards, and how to get the most profit from each piece. I'm about to break into a few CRT's here and I will go back and do some more research on the best ways. Some people just take the copper degaussing coil out of the back, any wire, and boards in there then they take the tube to Best Buy or somewhere else. This is probably going to be the best thing for us since I can't find anyone who takes the tubes in Alabama and it just isn't cost effective to ship them anywhere.

My biggest challenge has been organization though. I dont have a lot of room to store this stuff so I clean it up and bring it home in small batches. Sort it out and clean up my workspace so the wife doesn't kill me then bring one or two home again the next day. I am working on a deal with a trucking company that a friend of mine drives for to help me take the heavier stuff to some of the people on this forum. Basically the things that are too heavy for us to pay a lot of money to ship like power supplies and DVD/CDROMS. This company makes a few trips a week loaded up to Dallas and the freight is already paid for the load they are taking. I'm working on piggybacking on them and tossing them a percentage of the money I make off of it to the driver and company kind of like a bonus. If I make 200 bucks off a load of stuff and toss the driver a $20 and the owner a $20 I think I would still do pretty well.

Oh I forgot to say I am just now doing my comparisons with some of the yards and buyers on the forums here and local to figure out what the best thing to do is. But I'm telling you go back and ready every post on here and you will learn a ton. If you start thinking about breaking down CRT's search CRT and read a couple pages first lots of different ideas but it gives you a lot to think about.

Originally Posted by LadybugFarm97

Thank you Mechanic688 for the link. Thanks Bear for the Goodwill suggestion, didnt know they took them after scrapped, and know i did not know Bob Weston.

Stop in and ask them first before taking scrapped monitors in - mine wont take them unless they are whole.

Hey Marie,

I'm from NE Alabama!

hi marie and welcome. there is a lot of great information here and you will also find lots of inspiration. i've always wanted to own a thrift store myself so i can leave my 9-5 working for tha man job. good luck!