Quote Originally Posted by TJMETALRECYCLERS View Post
With E-waste prices plunging downward on boards and such, I am beginning to think twice of going forward with my E-Waste market.
Also, some of my clients have gone to alternative ways to getting rid of their old stuff and now I find my supplies being cut back badly.
Do I start paying for the stuff that for the last 2 years I have been getting free. I have provided professional service to these clients and yet, it appears that "money rules" and if some one comes in and offers them something, they go with that, not even talking to me about it, as to whether I could work with them.
I am just at a lost as what to do now.
I refine, but even still e-waste is so prolific that I sometimes purchase lots of e-waste, when I can at prices I know I can make a decent profit, and then truck them over to a refinery that I know that deals with that specific type of e-waste, represent my material and get paid out on full accountability of the metal content.

Just because you can't get it for free, doesn't mean you cannot make a very tidy profit on purchasing and ??? If you are buying to sell to a scrap yard it might be more difficult, but ask yourself this, what does the scrap yard do it with after they purchase it? Most of the time they are either selling to an even larger scrap yard, or a refinery. Now imagine you create a business where you are buying at prices equal or less than the scrap yard, and then having it processed yourself. You will make the money you normally would by selling to a scrap yard, plus what the scrap yard makes selling or having it processed by the refinery.

And let me tell you why this will work, and continue to work, forever. It would be less expensive for people if they composted all their paper products they were able to compost, separate out all the recycled goods they could get paid out on, and then save up their garbage to truck to the dumps themselves every month or so, rather than paying the garbage company to pick up their garbage. But they don't. For whatever reason, and there are many, from just being plain lazy to not wanting to visit the dumps because of fear of disease and everything else in between, people don't or won't take their garbage to the dumps themselves.

It's even more true for things like e-scrap



There is one company in my area that is now paying for peoples e-scrap. They offer a specific amount right on the spot, people are throwing their e-waste at them. I think it's probably going to be the next evolution in e-scrap.

There are people in the world right now attempting to bridge the gap all the way from collecting, to scrapping through recovering and refining to production and retail sale of goods made from recycled materials. I would like to think I have accomplished most of this. I like the idea of supporting the people who are collecting and breaking down the collected material though so I am working out a method of including this in my business model, for example purchasing e-waste and having it delivered to a scrap yard that will break it down and return to me the material I need for processing. Everyone makes money in this case. But that's my intent, to create a stream from collecting scrap to producing a product I can sell.

Scott