aubalansky wrote:
“... I was told they could be used interchangeably but looking at the identification forum, that doesn't seem to be the case.”
The major reasoning here is boardsort isn’t a scrap yard. They’re a scrap supply buyer. I know; semantics.
In the basic scrap industry everything is based on a 4 number tier of classing.
1 is best, 4 is junk.
For escrap here’s a few of the general terms; and how they relate to boardsort.
4-low grade. This is anything below BoardSort’s Peripheral class.
Terms at low grade, electrical shred, mixed escrap.
3-mid grade. This is peripheral, motherboards, low telecom, cd/dvd drives, etc.
Terms at mid grade include mid grade, midgrade, peripheral, escrap.
2-high grade. This is ram, high telecom, hard drive boards, etc.
Terms include high grade, high telecom, and occasionally #1 escrap.
1-high grade clean or #4 PM. If used this is hard drive boards, working systems, CPUs, cell phone boards, silver intra-network cables, gold pins and edge connectors. Basically anything boardsort buys at cell phone board rate or above.
Small volume or non-focused scrap yard buy from the consumer and dump escrap into one or two classes and then sell it by the truck load to large supply yards.
These supply yard scrap companies tend to break down the mix into 4 classes and sell them up to electrical recyclers and escrap sorters.
These companies further spurt down to very specific classes and sell to escrap source companies, such as boardsort.
Source supply companies like boardsort are the top of the recycling chain. From here the materials go to very specific recovery companies who recycle and refine, or sell to refiners and remanufacturing.
This is why boardsort puts such a focus on the sort aspect. They pay as high as they do for what a local yard would give you penny’s for; because they know exactly what a 1200lb Gaylord of gold ram sticks averages out to. So when they load 20 gayloards into a trailer they know exactly what to expect range wise.
As long as we’re covering terminology let me hit to more. Breakage (on the price list) and shred: used by many experienced users here.
First shred. Which is an honest name. Shred is anything of /some/ value that’s too expensive in man hours to recover manually. Items are literally dumped into gigantic commercial shredders that can turn a refrigerator or pickup truck into 1-5 inch pieces.
Or a jelly doughnut. These shredders range from the size of a table to the size of buildings used for ship breaking.
Breakage is anything that has a better recovery aspect by manually “breaking” it down. If not bought separately this includes Motor spindles, TV yokes, transformers, aluminium screen doors, appliances, cars, etc.
Despite the fact that most of these will actually be shredded first they will be manually broken down to some degree both before and after shredding by the same company doing the shredding.
Most yards consider computers and laptops to be breakage. The term shred usually is used for something dirty. Copper shred is copper pipes with brass fitting and nickel solder. Or aluminium-copper heatainks.
Aluminium shred covers aluminium heatsinks with steel clamps, batteries, canister capacitors, and, technically, aluminium cans with their tin layer.
The lowest shred classes are mixed plastic, and steel. Steel including all sorts of not steel stuff from paper and wood and plastic, to organics, to refuge recovery.