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I've been meaning to type this up for awhile...
I may or may not be the one who original said "What are YOU going to do when the computers run out?".
I got laughed at.
How's that working for you folks now?
I've been watching silver lately. Where is everyone at who bought at 40's?
I really want to call out certain people. But I won't
Except the guy in Iowa. He hasn't posted forever. Where are you?
We like names! Here is a starter list...
African Pygmy
Alpine
Altai Mountain
Anglo Nubian
Angora
Appenzell
Arapawa
Argentata dell’Etna
Aspromonte
Barbari
Beetal
Bionda dell’Adamello
Black Bengal
Boer
British Alpine
Cashmere
Chamois Colored
Changthangi
Damascus
Danish Landrace
Dera Din Panah
Don Milk
Dutch Landrace
Fainting
Garganica
Girgentana
Golden Guernsey
Icelandic
Irish
Jamunapari
Jakharana
Jining Grey
Jonica
Kaghani
Kamori
Kalahari Red
Khari
Kiko
Kinder
Kri-Kri
Kutchi
Lamancha
Laoshan
Maltese
Marwari
Mehsana
Mini Oberhasli
Murcia Granada
Murciana
Nigerian Dwarf
Nigora
Oberhasli
Orobica
Osmanabadi
Peacock
Pygora
Pygmy
Rove
Russian White
Saanen
Sahelian
San Clemente Island
Sarda
Sirohi
Spanish
Sojat
Somali
Stiefelgeiss
Surti
Tauernsheck
Thuringian
Toggenburg
Valais Blackneck
Verata
West African Dwarf
White Shorthaired
Zalawadi
Zhongwei
IF the computers ever run out I'll find another way to make money on the side.
I have been buying more computers and servers than I can process working full time on them. When they run out I'll still have a bunch to scrap.
Have people been having a hard time finding computers to scrap?
I haven't had a hard time finding computers. You just have to know where to look.Quote:
Originally Posted by 520
Honestly i rarely even scrap towers anymore.....most everything i take apart is misc electronics, network/wi-fi equipment, medical equipment etc.....no lack of electronics just have to look
In the middle of processing a load of 30000lbs of towers and servers. When full truckloads of computers stop coming in will be in touch. Until then....lol
Towers have become low end scrap really especially small socket which is mostly what you get these days.........Servers can be nice if you can get them.........You must diversify and accept the items that no one else wants to process or does not have the ability to..........I will say this towers for scrap especially the older ones are getting a bit hard to come by but this does not deter me at this point........I will admit I have hesitated a little bit in expanding my operation due to market concerns
Where on earth do you acquire THAT much?! The largest computer lot auctions up here are 50 - 200 units, mostly junk school units.Quote:
Originally Posted by JJinLV
For me personally, it's not possible to make a business out of E-scrap. There are not enough sources. Most of the E-junk I do manage to get is lower end items no one else wants to touch, and is not worth the time to break down. *looks at pile* Not much in the way of old stuff.
Does anyone have the information on a cheap and efficient way to recover copper from junk boards ? I'm betting that is going to be the next 'big thing' once most of the gold is gone.
tbh haven't been tracking recovery on towers with any detail lately but will perhaps do a little recovery this week and see how the math is holding up. Did notice a few weeks back that the newer-ish CD/DVD drives with the very small SATA boards don't justify a buy price much over iron and have been finding lots of them in towers. It's not exactly the same as the small socket colored mobos but is yet another example of how miniaturization is changing ewaste returns and lowering the value of towers. Still find them to be *very* much worth the time to pursue, especially since I spend a fair amount of time working towards greater than scrap value recovery from them.
Lots of places accumulate it in large quantities, especially trash removal firms/dumps, some scrapyards, large school districts and more. Am guessing (but not sure) that accumulating that quantity would be less likely outside of a city.Quote:
Originally Posted by RLS0812
I was looking at 20 pallet lots of towers and servers no more than 150 miles from you. There was 15+ lots of 20 pallets in each lot being sold.Quote:
Originally Posted by RLS0812
I just got a few hundred towers this week with those CD/DVD drives you're talking about. Kinda bummed because recently I have been lucking out with getting a lot of older drives with decent sized boards. Won't even waste my time pulling the boards on these ones.Quote:
Originally Posted by JJinLV
If it's in a tower am scrapping will still do it for sure. Including removing the drive from the tower we're only talking maybe 15 seconds at the slow end. But buying already removed drives (which have even lower labor costs, looking at maybe 3-5 seconds per drive) for much higher than iron will eventually be untenable bc of the massive decrease in board size which also affects the price of towers. The upshot is that they're more likely to work and selling tested drives is easy enough.Quote:
Originally Posted by 520
There's been a significant drop in available towers in this area. They've dropped off by 75% compared to three years ago.
If you think about it ... there's a certain time lag between the time that they were bought new and the time that they reach end of life and enter the waste stream.
There's also been a growth & evolution in computer technology. The manufacturers have been under constant pressure to do more with less and they've gotten very good at it !
What we're seeing now ... in terms of smaller cd/dvd boards & smaller HDD boards is a reflection of changes they put into place 10 - 15 years ago. The value recovered from a scrap tower will continue to diminish as time wears on.
The next wave of change back then was the transition from towers to laptops. They have significantly less recovery value.
The next wave after that was the transition from laptops to tablets & hand held devices. They have little or no recovery value.
Complex ideas .... but it's not hard to see where this is headed. Just map out the different waves of change that occurred in the past and think forward to when these products will enter the waste stream.
That will be the future of ewaste.
Another way you could map it out is by pc operating system. There was a large wave of XP's in years past. That transitioned into win Vista. That's what i see more commonly these days.
A lot of the Win 7's and above are still in service.
The whole free upgrade to Win 10 kept a lot of the older machines in service so that's created a pause in towers entering the waste stream.
There was a fairly significant shift from towers to laptops in the Vista years.
Tablets & handhelds became popular in Win 8 and beyond ?
Because I live about 30 minutes outside of downtown Atlanta, it makes finding larger loads of e-waste harder. I know there are major companies around me that have contracts with schools and corporate offices to remove their scrap. I get most of my stuff on the home-front. That being from residential pick-ups and some small businesses. Yesterday at work I had someone drop off 4 towers that were very old. One of them had a dual large socket motherboard and 4 hard drives. I haven't yet looking into the other ones, but I know they are all large socket and have hard drives. Wish I could get more loads like that more often!
I found 2 towers in the trash last week ;)
I ran across an interesting dual socket a couple of weeks ago. It was dated sometime around 1999 just as they were doing the transition from large socket to Pentium slot processors.
This motherboard was set up with a Pentium 3 slot but it had an accommodation for a large socket. You could use either one.
Just a curiosity from the past. :)
Yup. Nice dual large socket boards those are! Only see them from time to time here
I never really gave it much thought ... computer supplies run out ? well hopefully that is not all you are scrapping eh ? better than scrap and remarketing is also a great way to keep the cash flowing. Offerup and letgo works for me... not so much Craiglsist anymore - to many cranks.
Cell phones, tablets, I am getting tons of Chrome books right now, more and more ipads, laptops, whats the next big thing ?
I really don't think they'll run out..... at least not in my working lifetime. Also Steel, copper, brass, Cat converters, it's all out there , sometimes
you gotta shake the trees and see what falls out. I just sent in 3 pallets to Mario at about 3300 lbs and he is working on two sent previous and I have two or more to go before I go into hibernation, I'll put some nuts away for the winter and sit by the fire a bit.
Just wondering how it's working out for the OP.
No problem getting them. Now to start breaking them down. Also lots of printers around too.Quote:
Originally Posted by 520
Of course ... every situation is different. What's profitable in one area might not be profitable in another.
I know it's being kind of a Debbie Downer but i've seen a lot of ewaste ventures go southbound. There aren't many that survive beyond the five year mark. For that matter ....the same can be said of most business ventures.Business is risky and the odds generally aren't in your favor.
If you look back at the old threads ... there are so many members that aren't here anymore.
Scrapping is generally a thin margin thing so you have to manage carefully in order to survive.
Maybe a bit of a derail, but i'm wondering how others operate.
Do you just dive right in and charge forward ?
Do you carefully track your time, all operating costs,shipping, and taxes ? How do your true operating costs mesh up against your gross income ?
See ... the trend is moving toward less scrap value being recovered.
For example: An older computer might have a 386 gold rich processor, a decent lg socket mobo, and three or more finger cards, memory, and nice HDD and CD boards. A newer tower might only have a laptop MOBO and a few sticks of ram.
Pretty slim pickin's with the newer stuff. Most especially with tablets & cell phones.
Is there a thing going on where your operating expenses are going up and your net profits are trending down ?
That would be a thing to watch for. You could end up running in the red and not discover it for a couple of years if you aren't managing the business carefully. This happens all the time.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hills
As long as anyone is basing their value on scrap prices(the lowest price you can possibly get for the item) there will always be slim margins. For example, you can scrap a truck and get $300 at most or you can sell the truck and get $2,000-$3,000. One has a slim margin while the other is clearly the better option. While the newer computers and other electronics have less scrap value they make up for it by having a better resale value.
A lot of small refiners are gone now. It's more difficult to deal with specialized scrap, especially low grade boards and plastics !Quote:
Originally Posted by hills
Just a reminder, shipping rates are going up next year !
Does anyone refurbish these older units full time...........basically anything that will accept a Core 2 Quad or better has resale value.........Anything less than that I'd say scrap it.......What I have is a complete and utter disaster!!!!..........I have parts everywhere and most of it is not worth the postage to put in an envelope but if I can build a computer out of it someone will buy it (eventually).........That is the problem with refurb.........I have to have multiple of the same units on hand to use for parts etc.........Getting free scrap computers at least in my area is not feasible.........Good luck to all as this thread brings up some interesting ideas but we all know that the Windows 7 gravy train is about to run out
I've sold a working computer with a 75 mzH processor and windows 98 for $25 ...
I refurbed a core i series tower. Added a little more memory, an 80 gb ssd for speed, and second 1 TB traditional HDD for storage. Overall good machine and sold it for 160.00 $
The new owner had buyer's remorse and after a couple of months asked if i would buy it back for 100.00 $ . He's always been a Mac guy and just couldn't make the shift.
Even good used towers are a hard sell in this area.
Personally, i'm very happy w/ my core 2 quad. It does everything i ask it to do and seldom uses anything more than 1/4 of the processor capacity. I guess i'm just an old dinosaur.
At least 2/3 of the customers coming through our gas station every day seem to have the little i phones welded to their left hand. They're busy checking their Facebook and texting away while they're waiting for me to fill their tank.
Sooner or later they will accidentally drop it and crack the screen. Off to the ewaste recycling it will go. Maybe they get two or three years out of it ?
Maybe it's just me ... but i'm not seeing a whole lot of value there. They're too small to repair & refurb.
There's definitely a trend in personal computers away from towers, laptops, and tablets to the little hand held micro devices.
Of course there will always be business computers but the definite trend there is toward laptops and tablets. They're portable and can even go toe to toe with some decent gaming towers these days if the customer is looking for performance and willing to spend the money.
Broken tablets ... nah not much value there.
I guess we will have to change and adapt or fall by the wayside.:-/
As many of us in the ewaste industry probably have at one time or another..........Sometimes they are so clean and well taken care of I don't scrap them but unfortunately this will not sustain either a business or a familyQuote:
Originally Posted by RLS0812
I've considered a variety of scrap fronts. The reality is, ewaste turned into the least long term viable. Several factors came into play. Materials worth reclaiming are shrinking. Fewer towers. Tinier boards. More stuff that is harder to recover. The reality is, you have to not only have volume but the machinery ($$$$$$$) to recover all of it. It's easy now. It won't be in the future with the changes occurring in tech. The industry is consolidating faster than most. Big corporations have investors ready to buy up anything and everything with any volume OR beat it away from you. There was a guy not far from me who was getting a couple truckloads a week who sold to someone else recently. I have yet to talk to him in person, but he went from rapidly expanding on volume to perhaps either taking the money and running or seeing the writing on the wall...I don't know which yet. We have two other places in town. They have multiple employees. Both charge for their services. There has become a two tier system...those who buy the broken down stuff and make their money reselling it, and those who take it all and deal with negative value items that come along with that by taking it all in for free...and in many cases charging to do pickups.
There will be materials there, but the materials will always be changing down the road. And the amount of value in those things you do get will be less. What we see in five and ten years will be much different than today in many ways. There will be a few who make a go of it, and more consolidation. Organizations will keep coming up with new buzzwords and expensive certifications. If you can do ewaste where you are, I say do it, but look at is as not a long term viable plan or one that is extra money to retire sooner.
Full time no but I do it consistently. My biggest success isnjust upgrading the ram, installing a wireless card (if necessary), putting in a larger hard drive then installing Ubuntu on it which will run lighter and faster on an old machine and make it good for anything short of gaming or other super heavy graphics/processing computing. Sell the towers for a minimum of $30 when I do that and sell them reasonably quick depending what all I do to them.Quote:
Originally Posted by mikeinreco
Can't stress enough the returns gained from unscrapping materials that are brought in. A $1.35/lb scrap mobo is all of a sudden worth $150 as a refurbished gaming board after replacing a single bad chip that takes about $20 for the chip (depending) and 10-15 minutes to desolder and replace. The repair money will stay even if your scrapping services decline.
A fair amount of my cash flow is derived from " better than scrap" - refurb, remarket or sell to a buyer on the forum. there are many options. I sell many. many laptops online but desktops... not so much. for example I have two identical dell desktops with 2 tb drives, 16 gigs memory,
Fancy LED lights, A fast newer AMD processor and a decent video spec and windows 10 running very well and wireless built in !. waiting for reasonable offers but these are slow to move for me - more people are wanting laptops. BTW - I have a hot market here for everything MAC I can move macs fast and for decent cash when I get them so thats a plus.
I think it's because of black Friday and these will sell soon after . I don't mind the time it takes to find a buyer but quick cash is always preferred.
The old computers had multiple cards inside including video cards, large CPUs with full sized boards, HDs made of solid aluminum, circuit boards on the CDROM and/or DVD drive etc plus RAM sticks. New machines have small boards with everything built in so no cards, possible small SSD drives nobody wants, and the optical drive is like a laptop drive worthless. The supply of older machines must be out of the recycling stream bu now (in any appreciable quantity anyway). Servers are the last gasp in recycling profit wise and there will be less and less of those with 64 core chips coming out hosting many virtual machines in 1 server.
Referbing machines isn't as profitable since new machines got so cheap and people tend to want laptops over desktops anyway. Finding large working hard drives also cuts into profits and SSD's will lose you money if you have to buy them. So ewaste people need massive quantities of material or don't bother.
Where to find them all someone asked...
Everyone is different. Mike there may not be able to find any worth his time but JJ over in NV is drowning in them(good way, not bad...tho..is drowning ever "good"? anyhow..) I personally have no issues. I don't use auction sites. Word of mouth and good old fashioned going an selling your service to a potential client. If they use electronics...their a potential client. Ewaste isn't all computers. Cell phones, network equipment, telephones, various home electronics from tvs to stereos, blah blah blah.
I don't do huge amounts like JJ there in Vegas. Not cause I can't but because...I don't want to. If I did I'd live in Vegas, or you know...on the mainland with the rest of you heathens.( I mean heathen in a good way.)
Anyhow, electronics are all over. They are EVERYWHERE!
So when computers run out..there will always be something else. Like...newer computers. I know shocking right? I suppose I should've given a spoiler alert...sorry?
To the op...I have no idea what someone laced your turkey with but, you seriously need some goat cuddling or something. Very therapeutic I'm told. Will get that stress right out of you. Stress is...wait for it...Baaaaaahhh for you.
With that...I need to go move this pile of towers that there is supposedly a shortage of. I clearly didn't get the memo about computers being hard to find.
Toodles.
Sirscrapalot - Get off of my cloud. - The Rolling Stones
I've enclosed the following songs, as some insurance providers may not cover Goat Therapy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPUmE-tne5U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-diB65scQU