$$$ Buying Electronic precious metal scrap! $$$

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Originally Posted by kss

You will have better luck using facebook marketplace or craigslist than on here most likely if you need a quick local pickup of a relatively small amount of material.

Additionally, if those fixtures are like the kind I am thinking of, that is only about $100 of scrap, if that. so it is doubtful anyone will pay you anything for them to scrap them..... you could probably find someone on there to come take them for free though. Good luck!

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~ Regrets to Mario for distracting from his buyers thread.~

The company i was working for last year did the changeover from fluorescent to LED lighting. The metal enclosures were left in place up in the ceiling. The innards were replaced to make them suitable to 4' long LED tubes.

The waste product from the changeover was hundreds of 4' long fluorescent tubes and fluorescent ballasts. The fluorescent bulbs are considered toxic waste because they contain mercury. They cost the company .25 USD per foot to properly dispose of. Some of the older ballasts contain PCB's so they may be considered toxic waste as well. The best recommendation for a law abiding company with all of these items sitting on the loading dock would be to call in a waste management company that specializes in this area and is properly accredited by the government. You just write off the disposal fees as part of the cost of the changeover project.

Plain and simple ... this is something you pay to get rid of.

I have PC and Server hard drives, 60 - 100 pieces. Would I get the best price if I remove and separate the hard drive boards from the drives and send in both as separate pieces or if I send in the complete drive?

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Originally Posted by escraperguy

I have PC and Server hard drives, 60 - 100 pieces. Would I get the best price if I remove and separate the hard drive boards from the drives and send in both as separate pieces or if I send in the complete drive?

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It says
$13.50 Hard Drive Boards
and
$0.65 Hard Drives Complete
$0.20 Hard Drives w/o Boards

You would get the most for taking the boards off. and if you ONLY have these few items, it would make sense to probably just send him the boards and take the hard drives w/o boards to a local scrapyard as irony aluminum

This is because to get the most money, you'll want to seperate, but after seperating, you only get $0.20/lb for the hdd without the board, hdd are heavy and it will likly cost more than $0.20/lb to ship them.

So, if it were me. Boards come of and get mailed and will be pretty cheap since they are small and light. and then the remaining drives without boards take to local place and avoid shipping costs which would likly exceed their value

I have probably ~500 drives that I am sitting on waiting to take the boards off of.... the screws are just so tiny and its so time consuming!

I can't recommend Ewasted enough. My shipping costs are about .60 / lb. but every situation is different. Here's my math ... YMMV.

10lbs hard drives complete.

Gross profit = 6.50

Shipping = - 6.00
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Net profit after deducting shipping expense = Fifty cents


10lbs hard drive boards.

Gross profit = 135.00

Shipping = - 6.00
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Net profit after deducting shipping expense = 129.00 $

You are comparing apples to oranges....how many pounds of hard drives did you process to get the 10lbs of hard drive boards

"I have probably ~500 drives that I am sitting on waiting to take the boards off of.... the screws are just so tiny and its so time consuming![/QUOTE]"

Thanks for the confirmation of my thoughts. I too am not looking forward to all those tiny screws

Be nice to see the breakdown of boards vs hard drives on this lot of 500

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Originally Posted by mikeinreco

Be nice to see the breakdown of boards vs hard drives on this lot of 500

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Well I didn't count, but I did them all last night.

Taking the drives (without boards) to the yard today for irony aluminum. And I'll weigh the boards. From that we should be able to get some info.


It only actually took about 1h20m to take them all apart, 90% of the boards are on there using a torx t9 bit so I used that in my impact power drill and it went pretty quick.

I also sorted out all the laptop drives and have a bucket or two full of them that I will send as drives with boards. The screws on them are super tiny and finiky and the board is small by weight so I don't mess with taking the boards off the laptop drives and just sell as is as drives with boards. The 3.5" ones i do seperate

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Originally Posted by mikeinreco

You are comparing apples to oranges....how many pounds of hard drives did you process to get the 10lbs of hard drive boards

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Okay ... well that's fair enough Mike. It is kind of apples and oranges.

I know from experience that the 3.5" HDD's weigh about a pound each so i randomly pulled 10 logic boards out of the bin in my shop. I weighed them up and they came to .68lbs. I'm happy to run the numbers that way if that's the way you would prefer it done.

10 Lbs HDD's complete gave me a net profit of fifty cents.

10 Random hard drive boards gave me a net profit of 13.09

The basic idea is that it generally works out better for me to ship higher value items. YMMV

(Mario, please excuse your buyer's thread interruption. This would be one of those times when it would be helpful to have a mod around. That way it could be hived off into another thread.)

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Originally Posted by mikeinreco

Be nice to see the breakdown of boards vs hard drives on this lot of 500

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less than 500 drives obviously, this was probably closer to 150-200, this was about 2/3rds of what I have and I still have a few bins of drives I didnt get to yet


Board only weight - 7lbs
Boardless hdd weight - 138lbs

Total weight 145lbs


boards total $ by weight = $13.50 * 7 = $94.5 (shipped to ewasted)
boardless hdd $ by weight = $0.15 * 138 = $20.7 (local scrap yard gave me "low grade circuit board" price for hdds instead of irony alum, so got 15c vs 11c, but shouldn't make too much difference)
Total = $115.20




Other option, ship all to ewasted, 145lbs * $0.65 = $94.25

So at this point, you may think, hmm well, I can get $94.25 for them as is or spend 2hrs taking all the boards off and get another $20.95 ..... however, you have forgotten shipping costs.

at about $0.50/lb (around the best cost youll get at this weight/quanity) if you ship the drives as is, you are only getting $21.75 total profit ($0.65/lb for drives - $0.50/lb shipping = $0.15 net profit per lb * 145 lbs)

Where as for the first option you are getting $115.20 - (7lbs of board * $0.50/lb shipping = $3.50) - (some amount of gas to get to local yard lets jsut say $5) =~ $106 net profit....

The only way I would consider NOT taking the drives apart is if I had a local yard that bought them anywhere CLOSE to what Ewasted pays for drives (only one local yard around me even has a category for hard drives and they pay like $0.15/lb for them with boards) OR if I had enough such that the shipping cost was significantly lower or the time to take the boards off was too much.

to "escraperguy"
Basically, everything comes down to a math problem, know what you can get for what and where, and then do the math to figure out what you want to do there is no one right answer, every person and every situation is different.

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Originally Posted by kss

less than 500 drives obviously, this was probably closer to 150-200, this was about 2/3rds of what I have and I still have a few bins of drives I didnt get to yet


Board only weight - 7lbs
Boardless hdd weight - 138lbs

Total weight 145lbs


boards total $ by weight = $13.50 * 7 = $94.5 (shipped to ewasted)
boardless hdd $ by weight = $0.15 * 138 = $20.7 (local scrap yard gave me "low grade circuit board" price for hdds instead of irony alum, so got 15c vs 11c, but shouldn't make too much difference)
Total = $115.20




Other option, ship all to ewasted, 145lbs * $0.65 = $94.25

So at this point, you may think, hmm well, I can get $94.25 for them as is or spend 2hrs taking all the boards off and get another $20.95 ..... however, you have forgotten shipping costs.

at about $0.50/lb (around the best cost youll get at this weight/quanity) if you ship the drives as is, you are only getting $21.75 total profit ($0.65/lb for drives - $0.50/lb shipping = $0.15 net profit per lb * 145 lbs)

Where as for the first option you are getting $115.20 - (7lbs of board * $0.50/lb shipping = $3.50) - (some amount of gas to get to local yard lets jsut say $5) =~ $106 net profit....

The only way I would consider NOT taking the drives apart is if I had a local yard that bought them anywhere CLOSE to what Ewasted pays for drives (only one local yard around me even has a category for hard drives and they pay like $0.15/lb for them with boards) OR if I had enough such that the shipping cost was significantly lower or the time to take the boards off was too much.

to "escraperguy"
Basically, everything comes down to a math problem, know what you can get for what and where, and then do the math to figure out what you want to do there is no one right answer, every person and every situation is different.

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Was not a ware some of the boards weighed that much, good information.

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Originally Posted by alloy2

Was not a ware some of the boards weighed that much, good information.

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it was 6.9lbs to be exact, so I would say as a good rule of thumb, 7lbs of boards, per 150lbs of drives (mostly desktop 3.5inch drives, if it were mostly laptop drives im sure would be different), or to be better remembered, ~4.5lbs boards/100lbs or drives, or 4lbs boards/100lbs drives, if you want to be conservative or are purchasing/buying a bunch. obviously ymmv

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Originally Posted by hills

Okay ... well that's fair enough Mike. It is kind of apples and oranges.

I know from experience that the 3.5" HDD's weigh about a pound each so i randomly pulled 10 logic boards out of the bin in my shop. I weighed them up and they came to .68lbs. I'm happy to run the numbers that way if that's the way you would prefer it done.

10 Lbs HDD's complete gave me a net profit of fifty cents.

10 Random hard drive boards gave me a net profit of 13.09

The basic idea is that it generally works out better for me to ship higher value items. YMMV

(Mario, please excuse your buyer's thread interruption. This would be one of those times when it would be helpful to have a mod around. That way it could be hived off into another thread.)

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Something even more helpful would be for people to QUIT HIJACKING buyers threads. The mods didn't make this mess...why should they clean it up??

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Originally Posted by jimicrk

Something even more helpful would be for people to QUIT HIJACKING buyers threads. The mods didn't make this mess...why should they clean it up??

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Aint no mods around here lol.... this is the wild west!


Also, just food for thought, when I first came on to this site, and first went to the buyers thread pages, I looked at the ones with the most replies/views first.... so if anything, going on tangents in here should only help the buyer who submitted the thread as it boosts/pads the number of replies which was, at least for me, the first thing I looked at to decide how much I trusted different buyer on this site or at least how I determined who to look at first (thought being, lots of replies == lots of buys == lots of people using them == probably pretty good and trustworthy). Just sayin'.......


edit: also, at least my post was somewhat, although tangentially, related to what a person might want to do and what to send to THIS buyer in THIS thread. but yea, i was highjacking this thread for sure, my bad.

I was gonna say this is like free advertising keeping this thread at the top

Hi everyone it’s been years since I’ve posted anything but I finally got another Gaylord of e waste put together and sent it on its way to Ewasted yesterday! I was lazy and just let them provide the shipper. Hardest part was forcing my printer to print the BOL as my ink cartridge was dry from lack of use but after wetting it down a couple times it reluctantly printed them out. CFCS Is very easy to work with and I highly recommend them to anyone wanting to get as much as possible from their computer trash, I mean treasure. Have a good day all and enjoy the weekend!

It's been a while since we've heard from this part of Ohio. I've been looking forward to a newletter, but alas, none.

What's the scoop? Is no news good news? Inquiring minds want to know.

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Originally Posted by IamTheGreatest

It's been a while since we've heard from this part of Ohio. I've been looking forward to a newletter, but alas, none.

What's the scoop? Is no news good news? Inquiring minds want to know.

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No news is good news! Some news is also good news, isn't it!! I will get a newsletter out for everyone this month!

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Originally Posted by ajatkinson

Hello I was wondering if your able to buy scrap from canadians and if so what would the shipping charges and duty be pm me the answer if youd like

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The rates are easily available at canadapost.ca, ups.com and fedex.ca.

Just wanted to say THANK YOU!!! To CFCS this was my second shipment to them (or anyone for that matter) and I got far more than expected! Highly recommend them, if your on the fence of who to send to this is the place! Hope everyone is doing well and happy scrapping.