These prices terrible or is it just me?

Emailed a local yard I don't usually go to, cause they seemed to have more of an eWaste tilt and listed that they paid for a variety of different things, CD/DVD boards, full power supply boxes, etc. My main yard only buys some of the basic, well known staples like motherboards and the like. I was rather promptly emailed back a list of the requested prices, but they seem pretty low.

Low grade/brown boards - $0.03
Aluminum cans -$0.38
Insulated wire - #1 ICW - $1.00 - #2 ICW $0.40 - Low Grade $0.20
Lead acid batteries - $0.17
Motherboards - $0.40
Power supply boxes - $0.02
CD/DVD drive boards - $0.40
Hard drive boards - $2.00
Ballast - $0.06

Power supply boxes seems real low, at that rate it'd make more sense to chuck em in shred. Can't comment on lead/acids, ballasts, or wire but all the ewaste prices seem awful low.

The low grade seems worth it - the only yard in my area doesn't buy anything tech related
#3 wire is $0.05 below what I get paid currently

Originally Posted by Pokemonprime

Yeah, I was figuring that it'd become primarily a yard to dump my low grade brown boards. The e-waste prices seemed low compared to threads I saw in the buyers/sellers section here, but those threads, at least their original post date, are awful old and Im not sure if they're active/updated for today's market.

EDIT: just checked boardsort, are they up to date? The prices at this yard are very low compared to theirs as well.

Scrap yards will not pay close to what any actual e-waste buyers are willing to pay. Thats who they sell to. Sell them the low grade and ship out the good stuff.

Motherboard prices don't seem all that bad. The .40 is about what i clear on small socket Mobo's after shipping to a buyer here on the forum.

Price is low on the CD/DVD & the HDD boards.

Just a general rule of thumb for somebody new(ish) to ewaste: Try to avoid shipping things that have a value of less than 2.00$/lb if you can.

Originally Posted by Pokemonprime

EDIT: just checked boardsort, are they up to date? The prices at this yard are very low compared to theirs as well.

Shipping costs eat into your bottom line. IMHO junk boards are not worth shipping.

Ouch!! Those prices make my backside hurt.

Most of the buyers here keep their prices updated. If you have questions for any buyer concerning pricing, contact them. Most buyers post on their thread how they prefer to be contacted.

No one here in Mesa Az takes boards of any kind. Just the basics. They even refuse ceiling fan motors now unless they are taken out of the surrounding housing.

Originally Posted by Repurposer

No one here in Mesa Az takes boards of any kind. Just the basics. They even refuse ceiling fan motors now unless they are taken out of the surrounding housing.

There is one board buyer if you have a business license.

If I could buy at those prices, I would quickly be a millionaire or wearing concrete boots.

Originally Posted by Pokemonprime

Emailed a local yard I don't usually go to, cause they seemed to have more of an eWaste tilt and listed that they paid for a variety of different things, CD/DVD boards, full power supply boxes, etc. My main yard only buys some of the basic, well known staples like motherboards and the like. I was rather promptly emailed back a list of the requested prices, but they seem pretty low.

Low grade/brown boards - $0.03
Aluminum cans -$0.38
Insulated wire - #1 ICW - $1.00 - #2 ICW $0.40 - Low Grade $0.20
Lead acid batteries - $0.17
Motherboards - $0.40
Power supply boxes - $0.02
CD/DVD drive boards - $0.40
Hard drive boards - $2.00
Ballast - $0.06

Power supply boxes seems real low, at that rate it'd make more sense to chuck em in shred. Can't comment on lead/acids, ballasts, or wire but all the ewaste prices seem awful low.

Originally Posted by RLS0812

Shipping costs eat into your bottom line. IMHO junk boards are not worth shipping.

Yeah never intended to ship junk boards, I think I'll just be taking those to this yard to get something for them.

Originally Posted by Pokemonprime

Yeah never intended to ship junk boards, I think I'll just be taking those to this yard to get something for them.

You do realize there is a fairly large E-waste buyer in Miami. They have a buyers thread on here, but haven't been active in a few years. I know they are still in business.

Market is shot

Rising Gold prices should rejuvenate the Escrap market, shouldn't it?

I expect that a lot of the best escrap, circa 1988- 2002 will be getting a bit harder to find now. Is this whats affecting the market much?

I think you have to look at the broader picture when it comes to Ewaste.

You probably have to process circuit boards by the ton in order to do it cost effectively. You could refine just for gold and chuck the rest but you would be missing out on a lot. Going by the ton of raw material ... there might be more value recovered in copper & nickel than from gold. The yields would depend on the kind of raw material you're working with.

JMO ... but it might all be relative in regard to old stuff vs. new stuff to the the refiner. A ton of boards is a ton of boards.

It's an entirely different story for the scrapper.

Imagine processing enough pre-yr 2000 desktops to get a ton of circuit boards.

Now imagine processing enough cell phones to harvest a ton of those tiny cell phone boards.

Whoever said that good things come in small packages never scrapped one of those little buggers out !

Theres definitely less Gold in post 2003 boards & chips.
Theres 1/2 or even 1/4 of the chips on the side ( Zeus ?) board of a plasma & plasma screen TV's are not around anymore anyway.
The multiple boards once in a DVD player or computer printer, then it become a post card sized board, now its a playing card sized board & in my last printer i almost missed seeing it.

In the long sensor/scanner/reader bar in a printer its obvious, it once was 220+ thick Gold wires.
Now it hair thin, spiderweb thin even, 80 wires.
CPU....ha! Once was 0.45gms on a 'Triple Gold' now its 0.01-2gms on a pinless CPU.

What I'm meaning, is that current escrap prices are probably based on 80 - 100 CPU to the Gram of Gold.
Not the 4 CPU to a Gram that it once was.

Ohh ... man ... totally agree. The manufacturers have done a very good job of doing more with less. Gotta hand it to em'.

I was reading a study that was done sometime back around 1998. Globally, we were dumping hundreds of tons of recoverable gold into landfills every year when these electronics hit end of life. I guess they took a hint and did something about it because by year 2000 there was a significant reduction in the amount of PM's being used in manufacturing.

Long term ... this doesn't bode well for the Ewaste industry. I can see why so many guys have gone under in the past three or four years. It's getting harder and harder to turn a profit with every new generation of tech that comes out.

I think i'm seeing about 1/3 to 1/4 the volume i saw a few years ago. I would be in real trouble if i had to make a living at this.

Originally Posted by hills

I think i'm seeing about 1/3 to 1/4 the volume i saw a few years ago. I would be in real trouble if i had to make a living at this.

With the way the board sizes are decreasing I could see the scrap electronics prices going through the floor while the per pound prices on boards increases. What I'm finding is that the newer boards are smaller, but the components are more closely packed leading to a higher yield of chips and components per pound of boards.

It's amazing to see the speed at which these boards are decreasing. The company I work for has been in the process of re-designing some of its older circuit boards for the past few months. These boards used to have all through hole components and were typically 4"x4". After they were re-designed we turned everything into surface mount components and were able to reduce the size of the board down to 2"x2" as well as drastically decrease the price.

I think it leads us back to the Large socket mobo vs. cell phone board quandary though.

The cell phone boards fetch 3x what the lg socket mobos do but it could be a problem to source enough cell phones to make up just one of pound of boards. The other thing is labor. I can scrap an old tower in less than seven minutes and rack up a pound of boards. Can't imagine the amount of time it would take to get through all those cell phones.

I think you would have to do the disassembly with a robot. Either that or just chuck em' in a grinder and somehow separate the granules mechanically & chemically ?

See ... the trend for tech has been from large to small. That doesn't bode particularly well for the future of the Ewaste industry.