That all depends on the amount of time the material is milled as well, and the size and weight of the mill balls that are used. Larger balls create more coarse material. But, I think shredding is probably much faster though. Milling is still great for processing CPUs and other ceramic chips. Ceramic dust is easier to work with than dust from those stupid plastic IC chips. I know it's still time consuming and expensive on a small scale to remove copper with nitric baths. From what little I've read so far, leaching metals from cocktails of material, whether it's in a dust form or otherwise, is out of my league. Especially when there are PGMs involved. I'm not even interested in doing more in depth research right now because I know it's not worth my time and better left to a pro. All of the separation methods are too expensive and too complex and have no business being involved in any of my ideas. The only thing I care about is in what form does my scrap need to be in for facilities like that to accept and process my material. And that's only if I decide to go that route. Magnetic separation seems more in my league for ferrous metals, but as far as processing dust, I think that's the end of the line for me.

So far I've run upon several processes

Incineration of all components > Milling > Sifting > Blending > Refining.

Chemically depopulating boards & components > Sorting > Incineration of components > Milling > Blending > Refining. In this model the boards were saved and processed elsewhere. It was only the removed board components that went through the process.

Without incineration, the plastics, especially from IC chips, can make the dust hard to process. That much I know from my own toying around. And without depopulating boards, if PCB is thrown in the mix, that makes for an extreme amount of waste when the PCB could have been sold and recycled. However in both processes the dust was still being sent to a professional refinery.

I think if I just wanted to collect and resell, grinding probably makes more sense? At least grinding makes sense for things like PCB and ABS.

I'd love to hear more about your story.

I have around 1500 square feet of workshop space, and about another 1000 square feet of potential covered storage at the moment, and that's not including bare foundations with the potential to be built into something else, or used for stacking containers, pallets, etc. There's probably another 1000 square feet in open foundation for outdoor storage.

I do have small utility trailers, a 22ft. flatbed trailer, and pickup trucks as well. Lodos was talking about commercial trucks in one of his earlier posts. I think what you're saying here, and Lodos confirmed, is a very solid idea.

At this point I'm going to invest in a small incinerator (I've wanted one anyway) and go ahead and fab up a ball mill out of an old 100 gallon propane cylinder to run some test batches. I've found a list of 13 suppliers that will sell small "sample" lots of materials, from boards to CPUs. I'm going to buy 100kg of each "sample" from small socket, large socket, CPUs, RAM, and run them through the incineration and milling process so I can look at some real numbers. (Might do what everyone else does and start my own YouTube channel along the way. LOL!)



That is basically the information that I think anyone thinking about getting into this business wants to know: how much volume / how many?

Boardsort here obviously has some general idea for how much profit they can expect from the material they buy here on the website. Even if it's not a feasible idea, I'd still like to know how a company decides those prices to ask ; how does the itemized pricing system work? Or are they just coming up with these numbers by checking some national price guide and setting their expected profits per component relative to whatever the wholesale price is for each item? -- I just want to know where this information comes from. What's the math?

What's each board worth to them and what are the actual profit margins? .8, .10, .12., or .16 cents per board? I wouldn't know or have a clue.

(Just do all of the hard work for me. *sarcasm*)

I understand how a scrap yard sets their prices for metals, but not for electronic scrap. Maybe one of you guys should write a literal book, and then you can just tell me to go down to the library and read.

I'm really under the impression the average, middle-class person disposes of their broken crap by either throwing it in the trash or sending it back to the manufacturer, who then keeps the broken parts anyway. Reclamation seems pretty high since it's mandated companies take back their own products for recycling.

Small repair shops for cell phones and computers are few and far between these days. I wonder what % of the total volume of electronic scrap floating around the market actually trickles down to someone like me, or is even accessible at all?

Don't get me started, since I'm fairly new to this scene, I have so much yet to learn, so it is very much fun to do that through discussion :) Though I feel I gave broad strokes in my first post... just ask what exactly interests you so I don't ramble :)


so about 230 m2 :) ? It's ok for a start - I started in 50-60 m2, and outgrew it instantly, currently I'm at 350 m2 under roof + about 100 m2 outside for scrap metal, waste plastic (in bigbags), etc.



I feel like you are not hearing what I am saying:

DO NOT GET AN INCINERATOR, DO NOT GET A SHREDDER! Start with gathering material, dissasembling, sorting and packing boards... First of all, I don't know about USA, but over here, while I still need a permit (licence) to gather and dismantle WEEE, it is much less regulation than if I would try to shred/mill or burn stuff... Even regulations aside, the complexity of these operations are magnitudes higher than gathering/sorting/packing material, It is going to bee incomparibly steeper learning curve and risk for you to "crash and burn" goes up exponentially... I'm not saying to forget you dreams of ever processing boards - I am saying, do not even think on doing it large scale before your operation can turn over few tons of boards per month...


Great - might I ask what price are you paying them? Lets make it simpler, lets say that the price that boardsort are advertising on their homepage for certain type of boards or cpu is "X".... Are you paying 1.5*X or are you paying 0.5*X

If it is 0.5*X, then great - you already have potential to make money, you don't need me to slow you down, you can gather a bunch and try to process them yourself or you can profit by selling them upstream (to boardsort for example)

If it is 1.5X then you are just setting yourself up to lose money, can you afford that (+whatever investment in shredder/incinerator is going to cost)



It is irrelevant unless you can gather few tons of boards per month, and once there - you can easily find out - labs offer certified assays for about 500 EUR a pop, learn to do fire assay yourself - of course it is worth only if you have a LOT of similar material...


Oh, yeah, how?



I think the healthiest mindset for this type of bussines is to see it for what it is - a equal mix of trash management and resource extraction... If you haul away old office equipment, e-waste - well that is a trash man's job, don't let the name scare you, there be no stigmata about that, every profession is honorable, and waste management historically has been proven to be very lucrative... also you are the guy with the shovel that digs up the ore that contains the gold and all of the other resources, you will provide the feed to all these tier 1,2,3,4,5 companies Lodos described, there is no reason given time, hard work from you and some luck you shouldn't be able to climb the pyramid ;)

I’ll be back with another instalment later today probably but want to hit a few quick points.
When I was a kid I wanted to be a garbage man (or an elephant).
I spent my whole life learning and investigating trash. I started scraping a year before I could drive to save and learn. The day after I got my licence I took my first load of scrap in.

At this point I really DO have a handle on how yards set prices. How much profit THEY make. Where the lines are between levels on the industry. I’m no beginner and far from naive.
I intentionally research everything I can find about yards and companies I use. Make lasting friendships. I pass on my secrets to them, and they return the favour. I can now take a handful of brass screws in a baggy along with my real deliveries to my buyers and get a foot on the scale to give me half a pound for it. Rather than just turn it away. Because I’m willing to sort out and loose out on spoiled they trust me to not toss 50lbs of iron and sealed units in a tonne of light shred. Point being long term trusting relationships are key to survival.

So I’ll reiterate what others are saying: I don’t think you’re starting at the right point jumping in at the top level. Just because you can.
I understand it’s what you want to try, milling for extraction; but you’re not set up to make full value for it.
I’m all for anyone trying as a side project. More so when you’re cutting the costs out by making your own equipment
But you’re literally destroying the majority of your value in doing so: shredding and milling.
Let’s look at what you’re thinking

If I understand: You want to take hundreds of lbs of boards. Shred them. Toss them in a ball mill. Then use chemical extraction to sort gold, silver, etc.
Very good. You will be able to get fairly high rates for your PM this way.
But what about everything else?!
Copper
At the higher levels #1 copper is in the $3 range today. Source copper is $4.20. The normal light buy #1 is $2.50-$2.75.
Extraction copper is about $1.20 if it’s totally clean. Less if it’s not. How much melt, form, and test are you willing to do. (Again that XRF System is helpful here). You can get to the source level. But the costs of doing so? Will you have enough?

Source aluminium is $0.70 today.
#1 at 90% pure is about $0.50 with a light buy range at $0.15-$0.30.
Again can you handle the cost-value ratio to get to source or are you going to sell #3 blocks at 5č per pound?

But your biggest loss here is ferromagnetic materials. You need to understand there’s far more valuable magnetic materials in escrap beyond steel. Milling 1000 pounds of boards and using a magnet isn’t the only step. Unless you like loosing money. Nickel runs $3-$6 per pound based on purity. Chromium. An expensive transition metal. Carbon. Etc

So I’ll move on in the assumption you’ll go this route.
My suggestion is that you set up a method of depopulation for the first step in recovery.

Reflow removal and vibration works well and is one of the more popular methods. It’s a method used by breadboarders to start over.
Only more difficult on factory boards. In reflow you heat the solder and let it move, full in holes, and cool.
For removal you Basically want to put boards on slotted rack shakers submerged in a liquid (metal or otherwise) not reactive to the materials at a temperature higher than tin melts. Melting the solder and shaking the components loose for later sorting. This is most often done by using titanium racks and molten tin.

A far easier method is heating. If properly vented (and filtered) this is the most straight forward method for depopulation. Heat boards to just below combustion. Then bang or drop them.
With some engineering this is something you could easily pull together yourself. The best method I’ve seen both commercially and at the hobby level is to make a large commercial style toaster oven. Set up a conveyor system. Both ends outside, the middle in a kiln type housing. Place the boards in a single layer on the in side. It runs under a heat source inside. And come off the end just beyond the last heating where it falls some distance and the crash knocks most of the components off.
Heat removal works best between 800• and 1200• the better (greener) the board the higher the heat can be. The higher the heat the more that comes off, but the more the chance of ignition with older or brown boards.

Or the easiest to engineer but not true depopulation. Make a slide. At one end a large relative horizontal mini tooth carbide saw blade. Vertical slides work best where gravity helps. Board thicknesses are standardised. So you can make an adjustable width slide. Like the paper feed on a printer can get wide or narrow. Just adjusting for thickness and width. Drop boards in the slide fully populated and collect the split on the other side. You can set a barrier behind the saw allowing most of the topless boards to drop into one bin and all the components in another.

Let’s now go back to the why again.
Well. You can mill the boards here as a low grade source for tin, copper, gold, and silver. Knowing exactly where the low valuation is. You can use electrical extraction to remove the tin from the plastic and wood via a bunch of science. ;)
You could use a press to make blocks and use the mostly plastic/some wood mix as fuel. You could also sell those blocks to an oil refiner. A big benefit of being in Texas. Lots of options on selling plastics. And selling fuel sources.
This is especially good if you sort flashed boards from non; and keep motherboards with the flashed boards.
That way you can mill the good stuff only for PM recovery. And sell the rest to a use as fuel.

The major point of depopulation however is keeping all the components separated from the boards.
Here life can get peachy with a good sort.
You already have a milling system in place. So...
you can mix things like transformers, converters etc. Mill them. And use a magnet to sort iron/steel and earths from copper.
You can mill CMCs (ceramic capacitors) and sell them for pm.
You can fully refine out aluminium capacitors yourself if you want to build a second mill. Just add water. Literally. The oils and water being liquid you can sort the metals from the sludge: Submerge the wet mess in large tanks. The oils will float to the top. Easy enough to remove. Then you can dry the rest into dirty aluminium oxide for sale in pressed bars to a recycler or sort the tins and nickels etc from the aluminium.
You get the idea here.

Aside from raw boards, which you can use for fuel, heat, and even electricity production, I’m not sure why you would want to incinerate anything. Everything in escrap is of value. And anything you inecenerate without capturing the energy is just wasted resources. The lowest value in escrap is the board itself, and steel. And even that isn’t change at scale. Steel runs $30-$80 per thousand pounds.
And the boards when pure of metals can get $20-$30 for the same weight. With metals in a milled mix it’s not so good though. But... if you already have it there’s no sense in not selling it. Or using it.

Honestly though the route you want to take is far beyond anything I have ever had experience with personally. If dealt with shredding very high grade boards like cell phones and hard drive boards. Etc. Refining myself. Or selling it in quantity to a refiner.
That kick lasted a year. I break down electronics to board level. Sell the boards to boardsort. I strip mid and low grade of components and sell most mixed components as ‘electrical scrap’ locally. And I found a company now that will take my bare boards for free. Since my old buyer stopped taking them and none of my yards want bare boards, it solves a waste headache for me.

Boardsort can have my gold pin connectors from boards like that. Silver and tin go with scrap electrical. The same big bins filled with aluminium capacitors, heavy insulation plug ends,, resistors, most of my fuses and other such junk. Better than junk CBM since I still compartmentalise it. But one blanket class for it post sort. They take plastic lightbulbs too! But not glass.
Glass bulbs I drop in the free bin at the hardware store. Same place I drop off my (taped over) non-silver button cell batteries. Don’t even need to sort lithium from zinc.
My old battery buyer went under. :(

I’m not trying to deter you. I just am pointing out how difficult it is to start at the top. I’ve seen plenty of startups try what you want to do and fail. Spectacularly. I’ve seen a small number make it. I’m simply making a point to make a point. It’s not remotely easy up there. Even the best laid out plans are pure luck at that level. Climbing your way up creates a support and supply network so you can always cut something out and step back down if something goes wrong.
One company I use didn’t take escrap at all. Beyond whole units as shred for steel. Now they buy sorted and mixed escrap, sort based on the list up top, and sell the material here: to boardsort (so they say/said, I cannot verify it). But they list nearly identical classing now. After I walked them through sorting out a giant pile of computers they bought.
I was bringing them parts from hard drives and tape drives for years. They knew what it came from but had no experience in how. So one day they pointed to a pile and asked... ‘what do you know about this’. Probably because I brought all that I did, but so much was missing from the sources of the material.
However they don’t advertise that they take it to any real degree. They are still a non ferrous buyer principally.
So pick your key sales output carefully and focus on that. If you want to mill boards buying commercial scrap is a possibility but you’d be better served calling boardsort and asking to buy a few dozen tonnes from them at a time. That idea.
If you want to make money selling boards to boardsort buying a warehouse of old computers and stripping them is a good route. Liquidations is a great place for that stuff.

If you want to scrap in general most people make the best money in resales. Tinker, toy, test, and clean. TTTC. Or 3TC. Remember the scrap value is often, but not always, the lowest value.
A broken stainless floor lamp is worth about $0.50 as scrap. Or you could fix and sell it for $10.

Then again escrap as a whole tends to be an exception to the above rule in the short term. You can sell a 486 leaving edge for $10 or scrap it for $25. The cpu alone is worth almost the unit’s resale value. Add in everything else and the low end is $20-$25. But if you get lucky you can get some gold leg ICs like a bios chip, and rom. Which get between AMD ceramic and pentium/Mac ceramic rates. Or gold cap dip chips like the earliest AMD branded bios chips and cmos chips, which are better value than the 486 cpu as 8086 rate.

Buying whole escrap at retail is a gamble though. That same leading edge may be a repair/restoration. Where you end up with a plastic package 2014 VIA made 486. (Worth green fibre rate). And many replacement ICs all just basic IC rate. You can get an original 5.25” drive and make $3 in scrap. Or a modern replacement and get 50č.
Computer from the pentium era and older will always be worth more as scrap than retail when original. And could be much less valuable based on repairs.

_________________
42 6F 61 72 64 73 6F 72 74 2E 63 6F 6D

@ Arturs

I think you don't realize how easy incinerators are to make. Blowers cost money. The bigger the blower, the more money. The rest, with a little bit of metal fab, welding, and ingenuity, is all fairly easy. And they're legal for processing household garbage in my state as long as you aren't within city limits, which I'm not. A lot of folks that live in rural areas use them. The mill is just a side project to give me something to do. I buy new tools for my shop all of the time, I'm not really treating these very differently. Milling an incineration videos on YouTube revolving around the hobbyist refining scene are nonexistent. I thought I might do a few experiments and get some hits. Which are also good exposure when I get a website online that I can link in the description of the videos.

I purchased two domains last week and I've been setting up the skeleton for what will eventually a be a website to market my collections service, which is what you and Lodos have both suggested. The web server is already up and online. Domains are cheap enough, and we're just going to piggyback on our 1 gig fiber connection here at home and use a server at home to get started. Only downside is if the service goes out, so does the site. I think that's the least of my worries right now though? My focus is only going to be on collections. That made the business plan much easier to deal with right now as well since I'm not looking at making a bunch of large purchases or investments and I can use the tools that I already have at my disposal.

I'm curious how you sort your materials. I've decided to go with IBC totes (top cut off) and shipping containers to get me started. I'm beginning to look into the planning for the yard itself now. Sorting & Storage only.

As far as my suppliers, I did exactly that. I compared Boardsort's prices to what I could get overseas. I found a handful of suppliers that claim to be able to provide me large quantities at a price that I think I can make a profit on. I'm buying the smaller lots to inspect the quality and be able to sort and categorize the different components. Which might all go right back into making YouTube videos.

You mentioned the lab testing in assays, and in some of the other posts discouraged buying bulk overseas: that sunk in. I get it. But, if I want to be able to do research on that level, I need to be able to have enough material to even send to a lab. --- Though I'm not really worried about all of that right now.

Even building a good business plan costs money. I'm having to look at this and pretend to know nothing. There are agencies like The SBA and SCORE that can offer some help, but that's still probably not as good as asking input from people that have started successful yards, or collection or otherwise. If any of us were talking about opening up a huge plant of any kind, we wouldn't be speaking on a forum, and I would have hired a consulting firm.

There are resources to get complete mock up business plans for some models, restaurants or even an auto body shop included, but running a scrap or junk yard wasn't in any of them that I found. It wastes more time doing research from scratch than it does to spend a few hours going through a real business plan. There are example plans that I could get for large recycling facilities and plants, but those cost quite a bit of money. I'm looking for the "Small Town Junkyard" business model. Where do I find that one? *sarcasm*

Simplifying and downsizing something such as a garbage incineration plant isn't so hard. It's been done before. Why I kept bringing it up. That's probably the easiest information that I could get. But I'm only interested in only e-waste. Most plants contract out their services and charge their clients to dispose of waste. That's how they make money.

Are you trolling? You are not seriously comparing burning leaves/household trash with burning PCBs? How old are you?



They are going to use those videos to lock you up for a long long time, and rightfully so, you will poison yourself, your neighbors, your land, air and water...


I store in BigBags on europallets, used/dirty IBC isn't bad, especially if you can get them cheap/for free from other waste management companies




It isn't an answer to my question, what do you mean you think you can make profit on?


Anyway, I know gold fever when I see one, I don't think you are interested to open your mind to anyone, if you plan to start with milling/burning PCBs, I won't participate anymore;


Now, you are worth listening to, please tell me more!

I somehow doubt the EPA is going to come knocking at my front door for burning a board or two for a YouTube video.



They are going to use those videos to lock you up for a long long time, and rightfully so, you will poison yourself, your neighbors, your land, air and water...
[/quote]

I still somehow doubt that Big Brother is going to come knocking on my door for incinerating a motherboard or two for a video. How dare I pollute the environment without investing in industrial scrubbers?


I store in BigBags on europallets, used/dirty IBC isn't bad, especially if you can get them cheap/for free from other waste management companies




It isn't an answer to my question, what do you mean you think you can make profit on?[/quote]

There is no way of knowing if what I pay for will be what is shipped. I've never dealt with buying large quantities of a commodity on the international market, much less from China or Thailand. I could pay for a sample and they could very well scam me. Perhaps the first purchase is what I want. Perhaps the rest won't be. If the samples look good, that's when I know to go to a broker to facilitate every transaction after the fact.

I somehow doubt the EPA is going to come knocking at my front door for burning a board or two for a YouTube video.





I still somehow doubt that Big Brother is going to come knocking on my door for incinerating a motherboard or two for a video. How dare I pollute the environment without investing in industrial scrubbers and proper licensing? Give me a break.






There is no way of knowing if what I pay for will be what is shipped. I've never dealt with buying large quantities of a commodity on the international market, much less from China or Thailand. I could pay for a sample and they could very well scam me. Perhaps the first purchase is what I want. Perhaps the rest won't be. If the samples look good, that's when I know to go to a broker to facilitate every transaction after the fact, if only for the insurance and peace of mind. Brokers aren't free. What about the time it takes me to sort the material, and then resell it? The time it will take to determine what process will make me the most money... Basing what I'm purchasing on Boardsort's pricing, even if I turned around and resold material back to them, with shipping, I would come out ahead. I just don't think the time and labor would be worth it. But that's a risk I'm willing to take. There's a fine line between stupidity and good science, research. --- Maybe I'm wrong. But I won't know until the numbers prove to me otherwise. Just a few lengthy posts by two men on an online forum that I don't know from Adam. Which, believe me, I am reading.

I can't just guess this stuff out of thin air. Numbers don't magically appear. And if someone isn't willing to spend money to test a theory or a concept to see if it is feasible, then they should give up whatever idea they originally had. Like I said, I don't have a consultant. If I did, I wouldn't be here.

You can say whatever you want: "I've tried it. I'm in the business." Alright. Awesome.

I prefer data... Show me data: Expense ledgers, budget reports, profit margins, equipment inventory & maintenance costs, insurance, licensing requirements, taxes, tax exemptions, employee cost and wages, job titles and lengthy descriptions of their duties, etc. ; the list goes on. Or simply tell me where I can find this information. Which is what I need.

How did you find out this information? What steps did you take, what reading material, resources, etc.? Did you go to some kind of small business association and ask them for resources? Did you make any phone calls and ask for advice from anyone in particular when you were coming up with your business plan?

These are questions no one wants to answer. Not just scripted responses like, "Don't do that, that's stupid. It won't work. I know because I have experience."

At some point you knew nothing about any of this. Start from there?

I'll admit, when I read this the other day (https://mothership.sg/2019/10/news-chin ... cial-home/) I may have had "gold fever" for a minute or two.

ZK77 Does have a point on environmental issues.
So does arturs
Here’s how to fix any issue before it comes up:
Get certified. Yep. That’s it.
Texas is still the Wild West in general (and they like it that way). It’s one of the lest regulated states. The statement that you can burn is 100% true. And generally it’s not regulated. People really do incinerate everything.

Now if a dozen people end up hospitalised; someone will come looking. Scrubbers are good. I was including that in the blanket term of filters. And that makes all the difference.
I lived in the heartland for a few years a little over a decade ago. College town. Everybody open burned. The WalMart (one WalMart town) sold steel drums in the store. All the non college residents had at least one. Open burn was more or less a way of life, and still is there.
A few business invested in actual brick and clay incinerators. Even a paper and brush fire can get hot enough to warp a steel drum with enough time and fuel.

So back to the thread here.
Once you put it all together and get it working and test it on something harmless, like that stupid dead tree in the field, call up the Texas EPA. Get inspected and certified. Then have at it.

_________________
42 6F 61 72 64 73 6F 72 74 2E 63 6F 6D