This post touches on the subject of morals and ethics to some extent. I have written, then deleted a response several times already from yesterday to today. I don't want what I have to say to be taken the wrong way, and hope that I have worded it so as to make my point and not offend anyone.
Lets say I was collecting pennies and putting them in piles of 100 pennies each and had 100 piles, to sell for $1.00 each. Before I took them to the person I was selling to, i decided to remove .10 cents out of each of my piles, and then threw all those piles of pennies into one giant pile and took it down to the person I was selling to. I tell the person buying that I have 100 piles of 100 pennies and I would like 100 dollars for all of it. Is that right or wrong?
I can understand removing gold fingers off mobos, I can even understand removing some of the items that are not physically connected by solder to the board, but not ICs, Proms, Eproms, CPUs, etc. So long as the person buying can view all the boards, and knows what has been removed I don't really see any issue. But this is not possible in large lots.
If you are selling thousands of lbs of material, and using the old "buyer beware" saying, and stating that the buyer has the opportunity to view the material before purchase is laughable. When dealing with 1000s of lbs of material, there is no real way to check, before purchasing, what may or may not have been removed. Only once the material has been processed for it's values will the processor know if they have been ripped off or not.
This is the reason why you don't get good prices at the scrap yard for your material, and why if you go directly to the refiner and process it yourself, you get so much more. The scrap yard must build in a certain amount of buffer. If they can process high grade motherboards at a refiner and get a value of $7.00 per lb, then they can only pay you $2-$3 per lb because there will be some people who will strip as much material off the boards as possible in an attempt to make more money before selling to the scrap yard, so their $7.00 per lb ends up reduced to $5-$6 dollars per lb instead. In a perfect world where everyone is dealing with everyone honestly, the scrap yard purchasing the material would be able to pay more because they would know they were buying the real value. They would know they were getting 100 pennies for their dollar.
I figure the cost of my labor into all the work I do, I discovered that for me to do certain things to get more value out of my material cost me more in labor than I was willing to spend. If I instead processed other material I would actually make more profit. Instead of focusing so much on what you can remove from a board in order to trick the scrapyard, if you spent that same time, effort and energy into processing more valuable items you will serve yourself far better. The scrap yard will learn you deal with them honestly and not hassle you so much or try to devalue your material to cover loss they expect. Everyone will do better.
But if you removing things of value off a board, don't then complain when the scrap yard devalues material of yours that shouldn't be devalued. They probably realize from processing lots with your material in them, that they are not getting their value, and attempting to alter your sale so as to make their profit margin. You have effectively created a combative situation with your scrap yard rather than corroborative. Your mentality should be to cooperate with your scrap yard, not combative.
I work WITH scrappers, we are partners, I will not have scrap to process unless there are people willing to invest the time, effort and energy to break material down into a form I can more easily deal with on a larger scale. And if they deal with me honestly I will continue to do business with them.
Scott
Bookmarks