Mountain Man Electronic Recycling

Milk cartons were used to store the cables removed. All connectors were snipped off and put in a separate container. It toke about an hour to clean up a mass of cables I had sitting around the shop. into the three containers shown below. So the cables are clean of plastic or any metals and most scrap yards will give you something for it in this shape. Locally it is about $0.40/lb. Most of the cables are 22 gauge to 18 gauge wires in electronic equipment.

The copper recovered for resale totalled two bins. The value came out to about $2.20 for the 5.7 pounds of wire recovered. So even if you had a wire stripper to recover it as # 1 copper you would only be able to get a max of double your money or about $5.00. You have to count in the fact that the pvc coatings on the wire weigh as much as the wire does with this fine a gauge of wire.

All the connectors have plated pins and are moulded into a plastic shell of some form or another. The pins are sometimes very cheaply coated with tin. But some pins can be heavily coated with gold which is a favorite coating in the electronics industry. Heavy duty switches are good to save as they have contacts heavily coated. At any rate the whole batch would have to be ground or crushed and the metal separated from the plastic material to realize any profit from a bin of connectors such as this. From now on and throughout these pages I shall refer to coated connectors or the fingers of PC Boards as pins. I will then try to figure out if this kind of material has any value in the recovery process.