So Scrappers…you are trying to figure out whether or not to cut the gold fingers off of the motherboards and other types of electronic scrap that you are getting. The question is…is it worth doing?
Years ago the electronic waste was worth much more money then it was today even with the gold prices being so much lower. With increased technology, comes less metals inside of electronics (kind of an oxymoron!) and thus, less gold.
By cutting off the tips and edges of the Motherboards, ram, and CPU chips, you are making it so that the rest of the unit (where most of the weight is) now has even less precious metals and more scrap yards won’t pay you more then $0.25 per lb for units with gold taken off.
Sometimes there are things worth doing and things not worth doing, we recommend leaving motherboards intact while scrapping them. Just pull off the aluminum heatsinks or any large piece of steel that you see.
Scrap ya later!
-Tom
If you are interested in taking the gold off the board completely, you can research some information about gold recovery from e-scrap. But be careful with the various chemicals and procedures to do this correctly. We suggest that you experiment a few times with a limited number of RAM boards and other materials before you take a whole load of them.
Remember because technology has improved dramatically over the years, the amount of gold on materials is less and therefore requires a larger collection of boards to recover the gold from. It may take you a while to collect enough to make it worth your while. You may want to consider partnering up with a fellow scrapper in your area if you are looking to recover gold from a large quantity.
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