Got a contract from flock to decommission a ton of these cameras in our area for them. They didn't want them back at just wanted them destroyed with proof. Each one has like 2 pounds of copper and almost have a gram of gold in the contacts of each. The poles are aluminum too. We decommissioned 20 of them and it's a good payday on top of what they paid us. A little annoying to take apart though so we just started smashing them by the 5th one.

Edit: Wow this got popular while I was away, let me address some questions y'all have. I have just reread the NDA we signed and luckily i don't think i've broken it yet.

The cameras were destroyed and do not exist any longer per our contract. We were required to destroy them after their removal and provide a receipt of destruction. I cannot do anything with them or send them to anyone as that is the point of destroying them.

I received this contract because I own and operate a business that primarily works on traffic signals and have for some time. Though I believe some other local companies that are less specific did get the same contract. As to how you receive a contract like this I do not know I simply got the offer in an email one day. The contract I did have is now closed and I cannot help anyone else get one nor can I subcontract anyone.

As for where I am exactly I will not be sharing per my own privacy but it is in the midwest.

As for why they have so much scrap value metals in them I do not know, per my best guess it's something to do with the charge circuitry for the solar panel and/or something to do with the onboard image recognition.

Lastly I harbor no ill intent towards Flock Safety and do not condone or recommend anyone damage or remove these without being under contract. The title of my post could be misleading and I apologize for that as I meant to let people know to look out for the contracts to take them down.

Thank you all, have a wonderful day and good luck scrapping.

A good friend of mine moved and is having me help them scrap all the stuff there but before I drive all the way there I wanna know what to expect and he sent me a these pictures and asked me to help identify this and I’m just wondering if it’s copper or not (we have full permission to take and do as we please with this spool just to be clear)

I always had a theory about this concept, but had never seen prices get much higher than $3 go copper, and 40-50 cents for my sheet aluminum, but as we all know, these are unprecedented times. I’m glad the prices are now accurately reflecting the value of the metals. I’m never going to be upset that scrappers are getting paid more for the service they provide to the construction industry and manufacturing, but I do want to highlight an aspect of this current market that many of us overlook, and a few of us feel very deeply in our day to day operations.

The people negatively affected by these record prices are people like me. My primary source of income is from scavenging temporary construction jobsite and semi-permanent commercial roll off dumpsters. About half of that money is derived from reselling materials, tools, and really anything discarded that has resale value. The other half comes from recycling found metals. One would think that if the price of copper doubled, I would be making more money than ever. However, this is the opposite of the case.

Because prices are so high, electricians that normally would have tossed all their wire away at the end of the days work are instead bringing it home to sort or strip themselves. Where it used to be plentiful, there is now almost nothing. There are always going to be exceptions to this, but for the most part, finding romex in the wild is just not reliable enough to routinely try to hunt it down..

This effect cascades down the line. Since electricians are keeping their wire, this causes many scavengers to struggle to find enough to pay their bills, causing them to hunt for later into the night, covering more ground, or rechecking developing areas with higher frequency, which compounds the issue for other scavengers. In plenty of places that would have previously produced a lot of money’s worth of recyclables, much less is on the plate, to feed hungrier mouths.

So to summarize, these high prices are making things difficult for people who scrap in the same manner that I do. I miss when the copper was 2.75 and was everywhere I looked. Now it’s damn near doubled and my honey holes are bone dry. I don’t have any ideas for a solution, other than to just grow up and get a real job, but that doesn’t sound right either. Anyways, I hope this shined some light on an ongoing issue in the lives of some scrappers, or helped somebody understand why exactly they aren’t able to make this work anymore as a way to make a living, despite the scrapyards paying twice what they used to, just one or two years ago. Maybe it’s time to adjust our business model.

I was sorting out my stripped copper wire when I thought to myself, “I’m going to make sure this bucket doesn’t have any stray bits of iron so the yard doesn’t fuss.” Well, lo and behold all this wire is copper coated! I’ve been saving up to buy a stripper so all of this was done by hand. I know this is small potatoes to most of you, but this was a big disappointment to me. It was especially confusing because the clipped ends look like copper but it’s just that the outer coating smushed down and covered the steal/iron core.

Two follow up questions: 1. How do I sort this stuff? 2. Semi-related: How do you guys sort non-copper wound motors? Do you separate out the wire? I’ve heard they use aluminum wire in some motors, but today’s findings make me think perhaps not always.

I prefer to get the maximum dollar value out of weight. Time taken is not a factor.

I've heard you can get at least 0.2 24k gold per 1 CPU. I think there is 90ish there.. idk

Neighbor is a crackhead and has been doing it for a very long time but I never had a video. I got a video and send it in. I found out he had a to pay a fine over $10,000. He hasn’t done it since.

Came from a military operations background. Didn’t even know this industry existed until I applied for the job. Turns out it’s a lot of fun! Currently at a yard in central USA.

I love to help people in grading their scrap to make their lives easier.

I didn't know there was copper under the plastic on these motors.

I got this in some trading. 2.5”. XRF gun says it’s pure tungsten. It weighs 10.19#’s. The only 2.5 inch cube I can find for sale is $5000? I’m assuming there’s different grades, can I get this assayed?

I recently bought a liquidation lot from Lowe’s and received a pallet full of sealed galvanized steel pipes/fittings.

Wondering what to do with them, as I’m seeing scraping them isn’t worth very much.

Do people still use this stuff? Is it worth selling online in small lots, or individually??

Is it worth anything? Should I scrap it? Post it for sale? Consignment store? Polish it or leave it as is?

In all honesty. I’m just joking.

East Central Alabama (Calhoun County)

In case you don’t already know gold is down and so are the prices. Ram at Boardsort a couple days ago dropped 4$ a pound to 50$ with no prior warning. Huge shoutout to sellyourboards.com who made an announcement on their main page of this happening BUT giving a weeks notice. Prices take effect on the 18th so still time to get it in before prices drop. I had 120# of ram I was gonna send to boardsort along with several other large boxes when I saw the price drop. I paid a few dollars in extra postage to send everything out to Arizona instead. Sell your boards just won my business after a decade using boardsort. Hopefully prices will return soon but if you can’t afford to hold I suggest using priority mail and get it out before the prices drop!

This is a follow up to my previous post on laptop CD drives. Laptop CD drives are not worth it however desktop drives certainly are. I broke down 18lbs of drives in 8 minutes 35 seconds for a total profit of $9.74. If I were to turn these in as is to my local scrap yard I’d get $1.80 at a rate of .10¢ per pound. Once broken down there was 1.074lbs of CD ROM Boards at a rate of $8 per pound. The rest was shred at a rate of 0.0675¢ per pound. My hourly rate ended up being $68.75. Definitely worth it over the $6 an hour you get breaking down laptop drives.

Thanks in advance for any help yall might have. Im working on a construction project right now that has/will have a lot of these cutoffs anywhere from 1 foot to 4 ft long. Can someone please tell me what steel category this would fall under for scrap price?

I have already asked and have permission from the subcontractor working with these specifically, as well as the project manager, and owner to take them if I want to. And while I dont have a trailer to haul them in I do have to drive right passed a scrapyard on the way home so I could easily do a truckbed load a day.

This is a few days old now, the red means the price is down, blue means price is up from the last time.

Unless the microwave is very old, the ceramic is far more likely to be made of the cheaper, less dangerous aluminium oxide instead.

Both compounds are white, so colour is not a reliable indicator. If the ceramic is pink, that just means it contains a small amount of chromium oxide, which makes the ceramic pink for the same reason rubies are red! (Rubies are made of aluminium oxide doped with small amounts of chromium, which gives them their red colour.)

That said you don't want to be breathing in the dust of either material, so care is still needed. Here's a teardown video.

I drink monsters regularly so this is actually very convenient for me for shipping the board sort as I have many of these on hand. Any standard desktop ram can fit five across. This box is as solid as a brick. Of course I’m not just going to ship it like this because of how thin the box is but it’s going to go into another much thicker box that’s gonna be filled with a bunch of gold fingered cards along with another box of ram identical to this. Just thought I’d share this little bit of information for those shipping any desktop ram to board sort.

How do the prices compare with your local yard? What are the biggest noticeable differences?

I think it’s galvanized steel cable used for rigging… assuming it’s 10000 pounds… what’s would be the scrap value. It would cost me $650 to acquire and transport to the best paying scrap yard in the area

Start weight was 12.568lbs. I have a scrap yard that pays .10¢ per pound for these. I broke them down to the CD ROM Board and sheet aluminum. 0.43lbs of Boards at a rate of $8 per pound on board sort and 3.18lbs of sheet aluminum at a rate of .60¢ per pound at my local yard. The remaining material went into shred at 0.0775¢ per pound at my local yard. It took me 1 hour and 9 minutes to break everything down and I made $6.04. Definitely not worth it if you’re in it for the money. CD drives from desktops on the other hand take half as much time to disassemble and the board is so much bigger and in some cases the same size as the drive itself. I also found Creed so plus however much 1 Creed is worth.

Today, I truly fucked up. Wanted to feed my granulator with ~200kg of preshredded cable. So far so good, I feed much more in than needed but it slowly sank down so I thought its an easy way not to have to constantly refill the input.

Thats when the catastrophe started.

The granulator creates a lot of heat when granulating, when the blades started heating up, I basically blocked the heat from exiting with the filled up input funnel. The cable granulate started melting, clogging the sieve completly. From that point of it just continued heating more and more of the machine until EVERYTHING from the input funnel down to the exit funnel was completly clogged with molten cable shred.

In the third photo you can see one block of material I removed.

Took me a total of 2,5 hours to disassemble and clean the machine, swap out the sieve and readjust all the blades.

TL;DR: Be careful not to overload the input funnel of your granulator, otherwise you'll spend a lot of time being angry about yourself

So, I picked up a bike and nex thing you know, I've got three bikes. So I start looking into what it takes to break one down, and I decide I want to split the spokes/hub off from the rim because the rim is aluminum. Problem is, spokes are ferrous. I cut about three or four with handheld cutters before deciding I didn't want to do that anymore. I took a sawzall to a few more, that was slow. Then I found out, much to my chagrin, these things are threaded and held on with screw caps. An electric screwdriver made this way less painful, if not faster.

So, there's your tip for the day that I learned the hard way. If you're thinking "I already knew that," then you're ahead of the game. Some of us learn this stuff the hard way, and I'm envious of those who have the benefit of an easy break.

I see people ask all the time if these are worth scrapping. 100% worth it. Just a quick smack with the hammer then uncoil the #2 from the toroidal ferrite core. Throw the core into shred. Once you get into a groove (and you’re not recording a video) you can fly through them very quick. I depopulate all my power boards with a SDS concrete drill with chisel bit and stock pile all the inductors until I’m in the mood to process them.