Hey all-
Being a newbie at e-scrapping I just thought I would write a brief note regarding my experience with Mario/Ewasted/Cashforcomputerscrap.com. Overall, it was ridiculously easy and pleasant. The way I did it was: 1. assembled my scrap in similar piles, 2. weighed each pile rounding up to the nearest oz, 3. packed it in the smallest box it could possibly fit in, 4. logged in to their website and a. printed out an invoice to put in the box and b. printed out the FedEx shipping document to tape on the top, 5. dropped the box off at a designated FedEx site, 6. waited for the cash to appear in my Paypal account.
The box left NE Kansas on a Tuesday, arrived at their facility on Thursday, and the money appeared in my account the next Tuesday- total time: 7 days. Pretty amazing, really!
The box weighed 36.6 at shipping, measured 16x13x13 (a 1.5 cubic foot "moving box") and cost $21.37 using CFCS's pre-paid label. The total recovered scrap was 35.3 pounds, so the effective shipping cost was about $0.61 per pound. I don't have much to compare this to, but it seems pretty reasonable. I'm sure there are "sweet spot" combinations of volumes/weights in FedEx's pricing charts- with a little effort you could probably figure out what the most cost-effective volume/weight ratio is for your location (then again, it may not wind up varying by much).
What I turned in:
1. Gold connectors 5 lbs @ $1.50 = $7.50 (too bad my wife threw out an oatmeal can full of these things six months ago!)
2. Laptop/cell phone batteries 1.54 @ $1.10 = $1.69
3. Telecom boards 0.25 @ $4.80 = $1.20
4. Cell phones (no batteries) 0.65 @ $5.25 = $3.41
5. Gold memory 0.32 @ $13.85 = $4.43
6. Motherboards 26 @ $2.90 = $75.40
7. Telecom (different type?) 1 @ $4.45 = $4.45
8. Fingerboards 0.6 @ $3.90 = $2.34
minus shipping -$21.37
Net total $79.06
A few thoughts: overall, I'm quite happy with the exercise. There was a bit of a learning curve in collecting and processing the computers, etc. (which I enjoyed), though quite a bit of time went into scavenging them, taking them apart, and sorting the remains into piles (If you add in the wire, steel, motors and power supplies I turned in locally I probably netted closer to the original $100). Is it worth it? Yah, it is, so long as you have a place to put the stuff while it accumulates that doesn't annoy your significant other. I'll continue to pick up the odd piece of electronics here and there, but boy howdy am I envious of you folks that ship a pallet at a time- at that volume this really starts to make sense (Where do you *get* 50 computer towers at a time??? A different thread, I suppose).
Apart from the RAM sticks, the cellphones were the most valuable items- that kind of surprised me. I just got a new (very cheap) one at the AT&T store, and my wife grimaced when I asked them if they had a bucket full of dead phones in the back. If my better half hadn't been standing next to me I probably could have talked the sales rep into giving them to me...
One edit: I did have a couple (like one or two) hard drive boards in the mix that theoretically should've brought more money. I consider it my fault for not keeping track of them and getting them mixed in with the dozen or so CD/DVD boards I sent.
Last thing- I was a little worried about having "enough" of any one thing to make it worth processing. It seems like they accept fairly small quantities of items- had I known, I would've thrown my little pile of CPUs in as well. Next time...
cheers,
thebugguy
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