Quote Originally Posted by ACCR View Post
Food for thought... We all see the electronics recycling business evolving. In my mind in order for companies to survive there will have to be a spike in PM prices. With current overhead and inflation challenges I am thinking it will be difficult for many to make ends meet with where the value currently stands on the newer materials. While I believe there is twice as much of the newer material out there as there was the older material there are also many more companies recycling electronics than there were 10 years ago. Thoughts?
Maybe it's a matter of different worlds but i don't see what you're seeing. Over the years ... the electronics manufacturers became very good at doing more with less. Much much less in fact. Compare the size of a cd/dvd board from the early 2000's to something manufactured within the last five years. Look at the value items on the two boards like SMD's. There's hardly anything to them now.



I think about the trend from large to smaller as well. We went from desktops to laptops to tablets to small hand held devices like a cell phone for our computing needs. There used to be quite a bit in a desktop. There's hardly anything to a cell phone board. Maybe it takes 20 cell phone boards to make one pound ?

I'm fairly close to the electronic waste stream. One used to see a variety of things that were worth scrapping five or ten years ago. Nowadays .... 95% of what's coming in are bubbleback and flat screen TV's. You see a desktop or a laptop every once in awhile but they're not common. Maybe a few modems & routers but the boards don't weigh up to much.

Anyhow ... the handwriting has been on the wall for awhile now. We were discussing this progressively less and less phenomena here at SMF eight or ten years ago. It seems like it's come to a point where the ewaste resource is almost played out now.

That's just a small time scrapper's perspective on it.