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At my local scrap yard yesterday selling off some things as I do normally, when I saw a small stack of school laptops sitting on a table next to the scrap scales. I ended up in the office talking to the lady at the desk asking what they did with their computers, printers, tablets, phones, etc. She said they purchase as shred steel...
I asked her if they ever sell any materials to individuals verses other scrap yards or wherever they sell to and she said she wasn't really sure and would have to ask about it. I told her I would want to buy possibly anything related to computers including monitors, laptops, desktops, projectors, servers, etc.

She said that if I were able to, it'd probably cost me $500/ton ($0.25/lb) to buy from them...

Do you guys think that $500/ton is a good deal for e-waste or should I try to negotiate the price down & if so, to what amount? Right now, I know they are buying shred steel from customers for $150/ton ($0.075/lb) so @ $500/ton ($0.25/lb) that is obviously more than triple what they give for it...

Let me know what you think, this is the first time I've ever offered to be interested in buying scrap from anyone and I feel like I should try getting the buy price down maybe around $360/ton ($0.18/lb) but I have no facts to base that off of or anything... Not sure what I should do in this situation.

Thanks

It'll depend on the mix of stuff they get, take a look at the whole system and teardown sections of the price list here for a general idea of how much stuff is worth in scrap before taking them apart. If they're okay at 25¢/lb you'll probably be just fine. And if you bring the metals back to them then you're getting some of that back (minus gas/time) from them.

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Here to learn more so I can recycle more
My grades are my own opinion and not an official grade from Boardsort

Take into account your distance from boardsort and shipping price too. I have to send ltl freight to make decent money from here. Also how much plastic, low/mid grade boards are going to be in the material and what your yard pays for the other metals that are in it.

Ill add in the new bump to 60 cents a pound on low and midgrade helps out alot. I pack my pallet with apple boxes sorted by grade. The bottom 2 or 3 layers are all 50 to 65 pound boxes of low/mid builds a heavy pallet fast! A nice 1500-1600 pound cube now costs me around 20 cents a pound to ship

I would never buy mixed/unknown e waste for $.25/lb. It’s going to be really difficult to make money because you're going to get a lot of junk.

If it’s going to be all computers then sure but I'm paying $.03/lb for printers and $.01/lb for LCDs

I pay one of my yards $2 per pound for e/d/c/w.
(For the uninitiated, that’s e digital, consumer (small appliances)white box (appliances))

No questions asked
No status of quality guarantee
No f’s given.

About 50% of this stuff I bring back to the same yard at a better grade. That’s steel, some plastics, contained oils, uncompressed freon, etc
25% sits in storage for a pilgrimage to boardsort, and 25% (the non fmm) goes to my choice yard.

I’m making roughly $5 on every $1 spent over all. But it’s the laws of averages. It’s time. I’m ripping apart refrigerators, washing machines, aircon units etc. but I’m also picking up thousands of archaic computers and servers by the truck load. I got my PDP from this agreement. A WHOLE PDP. Lost in the fire but for years I was the onl private non-charity owner of a full complete mainframe. And after the fire we broke it down and sorted the scrap.

Your price is very low.
Especially because my fractions ignore the 50% or so I pull and repair and resell myself.

In the end everyone is happy. They Pa a penny a pound to three pence. I’m giving them a buck. And they are paying me )5 to take the stuff back after I did all the work that would cost them hundreds, or would get shredded into steel recovery when the weekly budget passed xyz dollars.

And I’ve pulled some really super crap from theee loads.
Like one of the ONLY 256-bit computers ever made. A beta company test of the HP constellation: which I fixed up and sold at $500 each, donated 10, and kept one. An original Pac-Man bar table. An upright balloon fight, beer time (later renamed burger time).
And on and on

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So, I'm sure I already know the answer to this but must ask anyways.
I'm assuming you're a 1-man crew & therefore I also assume that when you go to pick up material from this yard of yours @ $2/pound, you maybe go with truck/trailer? Question is., when you show up for a load of material, do they just load you from the front/top of whatever has been piled up since your last visit until your full? Or do they have a special area where they pile up the things you prefer? Or (this is the one I doubt the most) do they allow you to, I guess, walk out and point to the ones you want, then load them for you???
I don't think that most yards, mine wouldn't anyways, would have a corner of their property which they would designate just for me in hopes I come back quickly each week... Therefore, I would be really uneasy about $2/lb because I feel like I would get 90% stoves or refrigerators & maybe 1% would be computer related. I know that fridges and freezers have compressors and some copper tubing running along the outside of their cases, but without doing the actual math, I feel like it wouldn't be enough copper to offset the entire units base weight at purchase.

Sorry for all the questions, but I would like to be able to do the same, I just don't have the knowledge yet to feel comfortable about going out and offering these types of deals to local businesses, so trying to learn/clarify/understand!

Complete honesty up front. I’m a LONGTIME seller to them and almost as long buyer.
I have a class A/Class III licence and a tractor. Friend has a trailer WE borrow for these loads.

No we’re not a company doing this. Number involved ranges from 4-10 give take. This is a huge international yard. They get stuff by truck and by private rail line spur. Literally a train load dozens of cars 4 days a week. Hundreds of trailers. They also sort as well as boardsort does does if not more so; across over one thousand classes of materials. They are a metal and escrap yard, but also buy plastics, paper, glass, organics, minerals and stone…

So to answer The main question:
Yes, walk up to a pile of pallets and say I’ll take x pallets of this if you give my y pallets of that at z price.
It’s a privilege and I never abuse it. But they are that well sorted.

The price has gone up. The average walmart or best buy freezer will fetch me $10 today properly scrapped. For 15 minutes of work.
A highend microwave oven can net me $30 if I don’t resell anything. The low end ones get about $10 scraped out completely.

But a few pallets of white box crap, I can grab a half dozen pallets of servers, mini computers, old desktops. Laptops. Cameras, tablets.


I lift nothing. They have docks and lift trucks. They load the pallets in. 2 high double wide.
I have a moving company I use that has a LT to empty the contents into an external access storage unit.
We then spend a few weeks per load sorting the crap into a trailer piece by piece, from anything gonna grab more than $25 scrap and or sales

A good chunk goes to a competitor yard as white box. Sure. Who sells it back to my seller/buyer. lol.
Yes I’ve had the same stuff come in over time. More than once.
But the arrangement works.
For every pallet or so of freezers we get a pallet that consists a mixed a pair of rack units. A full rack pair of blade servers and power distribution in semi-working order… you can figure that out.

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The key is twofold. The yard has to be big enough to sort or busy enough to be lower priced.
And
You need more than a pickup or suv. At the minimum a 25k tow vehicle.

You need to be able and willing to pay for and move 25k lbs in a single haul.
I’ve done small trips where they shoved 6 barrels in the back of my suv and 20k in pallets on a full size car hauler trailer in a pinch.
The pinch is usually something like a truck load of leading edge systems from an office be here at 530am.
They also sell to boardsort now since I was stupid and told them to.
(I believe) They still call me first in large lots. We’re down to about a 53 every two or three months.

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