Electronic recyclers - Take us to work!

[H3nrik V!]

Hey,

Noticed that a few forum members work with electronics recycling/escrap.

Would it be possible for any of you, without violating company politics, to share with us some photos of how stuff is handled at your sites? I'm crazily curious to see it - and I am not sure, if I fully understand the amount of chips/machines going through?

[crazybubba64]

I'll try to grab a few pictures later today.

I work at a fairly small recycler part-time (we have ~5 people working most of the time)

We process all sorts of material from standard desktops to industrial equipment. We generally buy material from larger yards, as we specialize in electronics. A couple of customers send us raw scrap, which we sort and buy from them.

All working parts (or parts with resale value regardless of function) get sold on EBay. My job is to pull anything with resale value aside so it doesn't get scrapped.

As for chips we get, it is completely random. The majority is a mix of LGA775 fodder (crap P4's, early C2D) and a mix of some newer-ish parts (sandy bridge to haswell chips are showing up much more frequently now).

Vintage chips/boards seem to show up in large quantities at random times. Just yesterday, we got an assorted lot of parts that had a Q034 and several DEC Alpha chips. ES chips are very rare, and I have told my colleagues to keep an eye out for them.

Quantity of chips depends on the type of material we are buying. We do buy CPU scrap categories, but it's not a very consistent category from our clients. We definitely get hundreds of processors on a given month, between system pulls and scrap intake. Maybe even thousands for some of the larger lots brought in.

As for quantity of machines, the bulk of what we get are bog-standard office PCs. Since they are often SFF, we often get a couple of pallets of them at a given moment (~100 machines). Some customers consistently bring very large quantities of systems, often well over ~300 in a single load.

[crazybubba64]

Not too much interesting stuff to show, as we recently sent most of our scrap material out for refining.

Got pictures of the "Refurb Room", which is where we test/repair components for resale.

The "teardown" table is exactly what you think it is. Whatever ends up there has already been vetted as "scrap" and is fully disassembled.

The "graveyard" is not for the weak of will (well, for those around here anyway), as it's where scrap processors end up. I try to make sure that interesting chips get intercepted before getting thrown into one of these bins. Normally they are much more full, but we recently sent them out.

And the last picture is my drawer of neat parts that I find. Not a part of my personal collection, but all candidates to end up in a nice shadowbox somewhere in the office.

And yes, the place is always a mess. Stuff moves quicky though, so the mess is always different every time I come in.

[Glory_Cloud]

It ain't sexy but that's how it gets done.

[cvandijk]

Look at that nice old grey casings, these days you can sell them for a nice price. To bad the shipping costs are so high for the big stuff.

[crazybubba64]

[Glory_Cloud]

(plans to put a hardline liquid cooled build in the case of an old IBM PS/2)

That would be fun to see. In the day, I sold thousands on PS/2's,
their parts and emulation adapters like 3270 / 5250 / token ring
and other. Micro channel and ADF files.


God I'm old.

[rjluna2]

A paradise dream of computer junkyard

Where I work, I managed surplus equipment. Whenever I find old working machines, I try to get necessary information on these old CPU before retiring.

[Mr.Scott]

I like that Trump ram stick.

[wren4777]

I hope the voodoos those 3DFX chips came from were broken

And is that 775 chip in the last pic something special?

[crazybubba64]

[wren4777]

[Birdman.]

Those UltraSPARC and ceramic HP chips with stickers in scrap box might be something interesting for die shots for me. Pics of many UltraSPARC dies are still missing and HP chips may have some very nice dies inside so that opening them is always fun. I just hope to get pics of as many different dies as possible before they all get scrapped, preferably from damaged scrap chips. I wish I also had more broken mainboards and graphics cards to desolder missing chips from.

[crazybubba64]

[CPUShack]