Getting Gold From Computer Scrap

Each spot that looks like gold... Is.... stop jumping up and down... it's gold plated. the better the system or component the more of a plating it has, I have an old mac that a newspaper had in the 80's-90's it cost them $10,000. I'm not ready to scrap it but it was a custom job for a major news hub and if one bit of information is lost things go bad, gold doesn't corrode so it makes the best conductor when data lose is just not an option so the older the system or the more high end it might have more gold than a newer cookie cutter system you get from Wal-mart. But again see if there is a market for it before you scrap it.

One Memory chip, not much the mother board's have gold too. From the videos I saw on You Tube it takes several handfuls of processed scrap to get a nugget of gold the size of a few grains of rice, recycling programs are catching on so mailing it hundreds of miles is hopefully going to be a thing of the past soon. I have not done any scrapping yet but I'm really thinking hard about it for some of the things I have dozens of, and the extra junk, I'm still wondering about the magnets in hard drives, supposed to be really strong. Another problem with processing it your self, there is gold, silver, platinum and countless other precious, semi-precious and yes even toxic metals and compounds in a computer. not only that but there are things called capacitors that can store massive charges for years, deadly charges. those are mostly in the power supply which is not worth opening anyway.

So do it your self at your own risk, send it in to scrappers and get a check, maybe even find one that can return the gold, silver, etc. or do like me, sit on it till you are so poor from storage fees that you have to scrap them all out and use the empty cases for a ram-shackle shelter. To each his own I guess.

Edit: the old mac all-in-ones and the pizza box's don't have huge mother boards so if that is what it was you didn't loose much, if you pick up a computer and pull a muscle, well it doesn't have a lead battery!

Those magnets are outrageously strong. Especially the ones from the old 5.25 hard drives.

I have a 30 gallon trash can full of motherboards that I was hoping to sell, but it doesn't seem that anyone around here is interested.

I havn't had a problem with my local recycling center taking drums full of plastic bezels and little bits of plastic from old electronics.

They do, however, charge $10 per tube tv or crt monitor because of the leaded glass. Its unfortunate because there is a big dumpster over in the next parking lot.. (When I make ~ $7 per tv, I'm not going to pay the $10 recycling fee)

Haha, suprisingly, I'm in Alabama.

There are electronic recyclers that pay by the pound for motherboards & pick up the shipping costs.

I hang out at a garage sale forum where we swap ideas of what to buy for resale. People also volunteer info about where they sell their stuff. I've never sold to any electronics recycling company so take this with a grain of salt....one of the guys on that forum sells his cell phones to this outfit & is reasonably happy with them:
http://www.relectrocycle.com/index.html

I saw Mike the Scrapper on youtube great stuff maybe I didn't dig enough but I never saw anything from him aside from an ad to buy his eBook. I'll sit on it for now, but please let us know if any of you find great or horrid places to recycle e-waste. Now I'm glad my storage unit filled up before people started giving me the newer ones, anyone know if the 286 and 386 chips are as good as the 486 and early Pentium, for gold production?

I can't wait to figure out how many key-boards I'll be melting down this summer

I would assume they don't post prices due to changes in PM prices. When I first started looking into E-recycling it was because I always find cell phones when I buy estates. Like most things you have to have a minimum amount. I think I've hit that but am waiting until I entirely fill the 5 gallon bucket I throw them in. Anyway, when I started saving gold was over $1700 & they were buying cell phones for $5/lb. A couple months ago it was $3. I'm pretty sure you could call & get updated pricing.

http://boardsort.com/

Here is Mike the Scrappers recommended website. trdhrdr007's also looks like a good choice. Hambone's was probably good too, however, I couldn't get into it, because I didn't have the right flash player!