Making money with CRT's?

OK I did some researching and came up short. So thought I'd start a discussion.
CRT's - Is there money to be made? I know you can strip out for board, copper and ABS plastics.
So are the tubes the big headache?
What do some larger companies do to maximize there profits with CRT's.?
They buy very expensive equipment to cut em in half, vacuum em out. Then what? They get paid for glass? I just don't see a company buying equipment, where they wont see a profit return.
I can see hundreds and hundreds of CRT's come threw my door daily if I can see profits to be made.

Once they separate the glass then they can sell it, regular and leaded.

CRT Monitor is like a plaque in this country.,.. I will take them in but I do charge the customers, What I do is this,

If they bring in a computer with a monitor, I charge them 2 bucks, with out a computer 4 bucks.. Once in My hand ,

I snip the cords.. and snip the end and put that in the end buckets, the cords in the wire ... break it down.. tin, and alum in

bin, then take the board out.. snip as much wires off.. into the wire bin, take the yoke, off toss in a barrell.. not even worth

breaking these down... take the degaussing wire.. and put that in a another bin... and the tub into a gaylord, I've yet to

find a company that will take these off my hand for free, so what I do from there is take it to a company that is R2

certifed and pay my 12 cent per pound, it comes out to about 2 bucks a tube... I made profit, from the wires, yokes, boards

deguassin wire, and I'm ahead by four dollars approx.. so I'm basically 2 bucks richer.. or four depending on computer

or no comptuer.

Hope that help .. if YOu know of a company that will take them for free, let me know.. I've about 12 gaylords of them

getting ready to ship to wiscounsin.. thanks.

My guess is that the Dell Reconnect program that they have with Goodwill is subsidized either by our tax dollars or some rich guy into philanthropy. I agree that i dont know what profit they can be making on the lead, but more power to them if they will take that stuff. bnbsfsd....If you have the glass outside of the case, wrap it in a plastic bag and take it to Goodwill if one nearby. Do a Google search on Dell Reconnect Goodwill and it will let you find a site nearby.

the glass is used again to make more crt's, that's all you can really do with it, can never beer a beer bottle for instance.
here's what the're doing with crt's here.. CRT Recycling Australia - Our solution

CRT's. We have a process that will take a CRT tear apart the plastics, wires, yoke, etc. We break the glass and seperated the leaded from the unleaded. We send the unleaded to our lead smelter extract the lead to about 99.9% clean glass with in standards of reuse in variuos products. Our side of that business is called ecs That is the short version of it and that is why we charge $0.15lb for CRT Units. Recenesys!!

From a residential or individual stand point this is what I do. First of I only take in CRT Monitors an Televisions because I'm limited on room and haven't had much luck with CPUs as of yet.

I remove the ABS housing/ frame and throw them into a neat pile. *I remove all the screws from everything I take off and throw them into a bin so that I don't run over them or step on them. OCD perhaps. Moving on. From there I remove the yolk, the board/ steel housing, and set them into piles. After I've done this to all of them I have piles of the yolks, boards, ABS plastic, and tubes. *As far as the tubes go I have them set aside as I am currently searching for the best disposal price in my area. So far they want .35 cents per pound and these things are 20.8 pounds, 7 dollars per tube is no profit. There is always illegal dumping but that isn't my kind of thing.

From there I cut ever last wire and throw them into a pile, remove all the available copper and put it into a bin, remove all the metals (Aluminum, steel, tin.) and put them into separate piles. *The recycling agency I sale to separates the types of aluminum and steels to their satisfaction and then gives me a price. I normally throw away the boards from the CRTs because they don't hardly fetch anything and being limited on room I can collect a bulk as of yet.

From there I strip all the copper from the reels, rods, and rolls. I separate them accordingly as to whether they need to be rinsed or not. As far as the cords, wires go I have my wife helping me so I strip the wires. If I was alone I would just toss them into a general scrap bag as it can take a large amount of time to do by yourself.

If any of my copper is "Dirty" I take mineral spirits and soak them for about an hour. Then I wipe them off and if they need extra attention I will take a wire brush to them. The reason I am so tedious is because all of the scrap yards or recycles in my area are pricks, they would gladly pay you 1.90/lb for copper that just needs to be wiped with a rag, I understand they have their labor charges as well but it's just pain ignorant. I'm OCD anyways so I guess it helps, I'm normally paid no less than $3.00 for my copper because all of it shines and has no debris. I do however have a general scrap bin and I get paid much less for that, I think it's like a buck something.


In a 10 hour day I do about 20 monitors. That's all the work mentioned above with breaks, taking care of the children, and messing around. I normally wait until the end of the week to turn everything in. The small specs of plastic I collect and recycle for free in a neighborhood area, the plastic I sell the the recyclers for somewhere around .10 cents/lb. The only thing I have left to throw away are the boards and the tubes. I will generally just throw full bags of boards in the community dumpster, and the tubes as I said I am still looking, however they are neatly tucked in a box waiting for safe disposal. I've seen others illegally dump ewaste in my area and get FAT fines. I'm not willing to risk that her or anywhere else, not mention I like to stay as green as I can.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it! Enjoy Folks.

Just a FYI...we have a full time guy whose sole job is to run wire recovery. I had him run the recovery on a few copper yolks with all of the glass removed. They recovered an average 40.8% #2 copper each. Based on what my yard is currently paying for #2 copper ($3.19 lb.) you would roughly make $1.27 a lb. on copper bearing yolks.

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Originally Posted by Voslik;

The only thing I have left to throw away are the boards and the tubes. I will generally just throw full bags of boards in the community dumpster, and the tubes as I said I am still looking, however they are neatly tucked in a box waiting for safe disposal. I've seen others illegally dump ewaste in my area and get FAT fines. I'm not willing to risk that her or anywhere else, not mention I like to stay as green as I can.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it! Enjoy Folks.

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So is your community dump setup to handle and process Ewaste? If not by dumping the boards your are still not dealing with hem properly. These are a source of contamination as well.

Hiccup...aside from the occasional mercury switch, what exactly to you define as contamination on a board?

Lead in the solder on the boards maybe?

Lead I do believe. It leaches into ground water if it goes to landfills.

From Wiki; Substances found in large quantities include epoxy resins, fiberglass, PCBs, PVC (polyvinyl chlorides), thermosetting plastics, lead, tin, copper, silicon, beryllium, carbon, iron and aluminium.

Elements found in small amounts include cadmium, mercury, and thallium.[41]

Elements found in trace amounts include americium, antimony, arsenic, barium, bismuth, boron, cobalt, europium, gallium, germanium, gold, indium, lithium, manganese, nickel, niobium, palladium, platinum, rhodium, ruthenium, selenium, silver, tantalum, terbium, thorium, titanium, vanadium, and yttrium.

CRT glass can be recycled into new glass for bottles, windows ect.

Here is a company that will sell you a furnace.

Recycling CRTs from Televisions & Computer Screens - © Nulife Glass

PCBs in the capacitors as well.

They do fetch shred price at the least and my local non ferrous yard pays slightly higher.

Here is what I do with monitors. If I am getting some e-scrap from someone, I will handle them at no cost to my customer. It costs me nothing to properly dispose of them except for a small amount of gas.

I snip the wires and after that I am done with them. I then take them to my goodwill reconnect location which is close. I leave everything in them. Why? So there is some meat on the bone. If there is some meat on the bone there is a much better chance of them continuing this endeavor.

THe nearest I can figure is that reconnect is NOT subsidized by the government or some philanthropist, but by Dell. Dell is taking the brunt of this for 2 reasons.

First and foremost,....there is money in recycling old electronicss as we all know and if you have ever dropped off any monitors at goodwill and helped them carry them inside, then you know that the bins they go in have a bunch of other escrap as well. They take it all and if they lose a little on the monitors they surely make it up on the computers that are in that bin. A stripped monitor will surely cost them money and if all they got was bunch of stripped monitors then they would have stopped this some time ago. They are at the bare minimum recouping their expense of running this recycling program as far as I can tell.

Reason number 2......It makes them look good. What an awesome pairing. Dell and Goodwill recycling all of your electronics for FREE. It actually makes both entities look like saints in this day and age.

And yes, I said I snip the cords and deliver to help this program. It helps them keep it going, and makes me feel green all over.

Conecsus this is part of our company just another arm that processes CRT Glass.

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Reason number 2......It makes them look good. What an awesome pairing. Dell and Goodwill recycling all of your electronics for FREE. It actually makes both entities look like saints in this day and age.

And yes, I said I snip the cords and deliver to help this program.

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Not to mention that Dell probably gets a big tax writeoff for their effort..

Rest assured, Dell is certainly making money off this. Stripped or not. They wouldn't do this, otherwise, guaranteed. Don't forget there's a (large amount of) lead and ABS plastic in those "worthless" stripped monitors.
I have a place (not a Goodwill but very similar) that accept my CRT tubes, and I asked about this... I was surprised at first when they said they'll gladly accept just the shells and tubes. My place is actually a nonprofit, but they do get reimbursed for their operating fees (paying employees, bills, etc). I was told that they basically accumulate a truckload of ALL dead electronics (they try to refurbish healthier ones for re-sale) and get reimbursed based on the weight of all of it... doesn't matter what it is. From high end fully loaded IBM servers from the 80s down to stripped monitors and keyboards, they get paid the same rate per ton. How much? I don't know and didn't ask, maybe I will next time.
I still try to mix in working stuff with my stripped stuff just because I know functional items may eventually be re-used by someone who really needs it, but there's no reason to feel bad about "donating" stripped down monitors and such. It's all the same to them. Note this is for my local place, not Goodwill, but I'm sure it's very similar.

Dell is not making money off this... This is their responsibility.. If they had it their way they would leave it up to everyone else to handle it. They do not want to handle any of their products after they are sold.. They have to put up a specific amount of money every year to cover the cost of the recycling of the electronics they sell... That was money in their pocket prior to state sponsored e-waste laws. The E-waste is not being shipped back to dell for them to de-manufacture it and take the value of the components. It is being handled by large collectives that have to audit every last lb of equipment that gets recycled on their behalf. It is an extremely complicated and costly process that manufacturers wish never happened in the first place, but was absolutely vital.

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Originally Posted by Hiccup

So is your community dump setup to handle and process Ewaste? If not by dumping the boards your are still not dealing with hem properly. These are a source of contamination as well.

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I've talked with our dumps and community dumps, it might not be green, however since the boards are broken up and in bags they both except them and it's completely legal. It might be morally wrong however, so I will look for a green way of recycling them. The advice is much appreciated however, I wasn't aware they were that toxic.