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I live in a part of the country that is literally throwing away tons of electronics. Circuit boards left and right, tossed into scrap pile. If only there were an easier way to discern valuable boards from junk . It's like reading hieroglyphics to the common person. I have scrapped metal all my life and have been seeing this waste for years . Any simple advice for sorting ( i.e. valuable chips or components) would be greatly appreciated. The advice video posted here causes nothing but confusion. Thanks

What is confusing about their categories?

I think the videos are pretty good.

There are basically 3 categories: telecom, peripheral, power boards. Telecom come from telecom devices, sometimes medical devices, industrial, military. Peripheral come out of everyday stuff and power boards are self explanatory.

each category has 2 sub categories (I am intentionally simplifying it) high low. Power boards are called low/mid but they're the same price regardless

The difference between a high and a low is the presence of heavy "junk" aluminum, steel, copper.... A low grade peripheral or telecom can be upgraded to high by simply removing any heavy non-precious metals. Pulling off transformers, large capacitors, heat sinks... etc.

Without knowing your exact situation any advice will be pretty generalized and in no particular order but here goes:

If it's being thrown away, presumably it's available for you to take for free (barring any municipal restrictions on taking trash, which do exist places). Meaning everything has the potential for making you money.

If you've been recycling metals you know you didn't learn everything overnight. Circuit boards are no different. You also know steel is cheaper than aluminum which is cheaper than brass which is cheaper than copper and that there's nuance to all of those. Circuit boards just add less common metals to the mix. Tin, lead, nickel etc... on the lower end. Gold, silver, rhodium, platinum etc... on the higher end.

This is a great reference, especially Ropeman's links to actual items discussed in the forum.

Personal computers are fairly standard and you'll likely encounter those. So learn what a motherboard, power supply unit (PSU), expansion/graphics/gold-finger card, CD/DVD drive, floppy drive, hard disk drive, random access memory (RAM) and central processing unit (CPU) are. RAM and CPUs are the most valuable items by weight you'll get from those. PCs are also good to repair and sell working if you want to go that route.

If you pull a circuit board out of something cheap it's probably not that valuable. If it's from something that looks expensive or that has to last a long time, there's a chance the board is worth more.

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Here to learn more so I can recycle more
My grades are my own opinion and not an official grade from Boardsort