Cell Tower scrap

Hello everyone new to the forums.

I have some questions and maybe some of you people can help me out.

I work for a cell tower contractor,This time of year is slow for us.

Our employer lets us scrap out our yard at the end of the year to make up for low hours.

Our problem is besides the copper , aluminum and steel which is obvious,We get a lot of electronic scrap.

Which usually goes into the dumpster (this part will probably make some of you sick).

After breaking down cabinets and tower mounted equipment we noticed obvious potential for precious metals.

If anyone has experience with this type of scrap they could share with me and the crew it would be greatly helpfull

Check buyers section and read this forum.......Offer to take the electronics going in the dumpster for free (will save on dump fees)...........store them until you learn a little more about them then begin the process of breaking them down and selling the compnents

I know the parts I would want. I never get whole tower parts so I can't help there but anything gold plated is a good place to start.

Eric

You got some great advice, follow it. Mike.

To add to what's been already said, your answer is a most likely capitol Yes. If it is telecom equipment, those boards pay more than even the best of motherboard prices. And, to reiterate what mike already said, read the electronics threads a lot until you know what to scrap and what might have better resale value elsewhere. To each his own, but to me, scrap is the final option. Sometimes you can do far better(of course with a little more patience and effort) by selling some things to a secondary market. There is an extremely good example of this just recently, a guy was going to strip an old keyboard but couldn't find his driver, and in the meanwhile googled it and found a current thread with info. So instead of scrapping it(for a ten cent strip of mylar, which that board didn't have anyway) he decided to list it on Ebay. Ten days later his auction closed at well over a thousand dollars ; )
Welcome to SMF man, and good luck

All the info you need is here just search. The post above are great places to start too. Id contact Chris at CRS. He does a lot of cell tower contracts.

Aaron.

what kind of quantity are you talking about? 10's, 100's, or 1000's?

are there a lot of them that are the same, or mostly random? If you have a few that you have a good amount of, its worth taking pics of the top and bottome, then sending the pics to a few buyers.

You tend to get better pricing if you have a lot of the same board. Why separate 50lbs into 7 categories that differ by .10 each?

Tear them apart and take pictures of the boards, should be some good money in them!

Most boards out of Andrew type boxes multipliers etc are very thin and hard to access (usually 35-40 t8 torx). Every now and then you will find a board completely covered in gold foil. See my older post for examples. Most of the time we sell them for dirty or extruded aluminum.

We tear down that kind of scrap at our facility. We would be interested in talking to you Pm me or call. 970-986-4002 thanks Ken

My company has a huge stack of cell tower antennae. Various models, frequencies and sizes. All of them have tested beyond the acceptable operating levels though. We want to do something more than throw them in the landfill (other than that being unkind to mother nature it is also expensive). Does anyone know of a recycling facility or repurposing agency that handles used cell tower antennae??