Should I or Shouldn't I Take the E-waste Plunge ??

As much as anything experience is the best teacher. Before deciding to get into e-waste why not do some processing and ship out a few boxes to one of the buyers here ?

Most of the local scrappers in my area have their heads wrapped around steel, aluminum, copper & brass because that's what they have always done. You know how it is ..... monkey see / monkey do. Someone comes in and starts scrapping electronics then they take an interest. They want to do it too.



To Them: E-waste is something complicated and really weird. I can tell by looking at their leavings that they're still thinking in terms of aluminum & copper. If they see something familiar like a wire or an aluminum heat sink they grab it and toss the rest. They like hard drives because it's a chunk of higher grade aluminum.

They're completely overlooking the gold bearing items that are right there in plain view.

Towers are about the easiest thing to do. I tore one down in front of a couple of the local guys so that if they did want to get into it they could. Again ... they could care less about the processor & the ram. They seemed more interested in the power supply because that's where the copper transformers & ferrites are.

That's what's gonna help em' most so i explained where to look for the power boards that are found in most electronics/

For whatever it's worth the basic breakdown of a tower isn't that hard to do. You could almost set it up like an assembly line and have separate bins for each of the components. It could go like this:

Bin #1: Plastics
Bin #2: Steel
Bin #3: Power supplies
Bin #4: Floppy disc drives
Bin #5: CD / DVD drives
Bin #6: Finger cards
Bin #7: Hard drives
Bin #8: Computer wire

What's left after that is the motherboard. You have to break that down a little bit but it's not hard.

Bin # 9a: processor cooling fans
Bin #9b: Aluminum heat sinks
Bin #9c: Processors
Bin # 9d: Memory chips
Bin # 9e: The little coin cell batteries like you find in a watch

That's pretty much all there is. It's not hard to do a basic teardown like this in under ten minutes. From there you're pretty much ready to start selling stuff to your buyers.

If you've got guys on the clock and it's a slow day you could have them do this instead of idling. You could train just about anybody to do it.

That would be one way of getting your feet wet without getting a lot invested in it. If it pans out, and you like doing it,you could gradually start branching out into other e-waste items.