Establishing an e-scrap standard

Since its inception, education has been a core tenet of Alliance, Ohio-based electronics recycling company Boardsort.

For 15 years, the company has worked to shed light on electronic scrap pricing, enhancing the level of transparency and knowledge for buyers and sellers of these materials.

The Boardsort website features a color-coded public pricing tool, informational videos and thousands of message boards that connect e-scrap generators and consumers to provide visibility into the pricing of electronic scrap.

The company’s motto—“learn, sell, profit”—applies to Boardsort as well as its customers.

“The more educated my customer is, it’s better for us both,” Boardsort co-founder Chris Skeeles says.

What started as a two-person operation in 2010 has grown into a company with 14 employees and two locations.

Boardsort specializes in buying and processing circuit boards and computer chips, as well as other used electronics. Along with its headquarters in Alliance, the company has a warehouse in Wickliffe, Ohio, to store outbound shipments and facilitate public drop-offs.

According to Skeeles, Boardsort has seen consistent growth over the years, largely thanks to the price of gold.

“That’s really what our strong point is,” he says. “It helps our business as the gold, silver and copper markets increase.”

As demand for electronics recycling services grew in the 2010s, Skeeles says he and co-founder Bruce Opdahl saw a market need for pricing standardization.

“There really was not a lot of information out there available to a commercial scrapyard, all the way down to a basic retail customer,” Skeeles says. “It was pretty much the Wild West. … When you were selling your materials, it [depended] on where you were taking them. There was no standardized pricing. You might get 10 cents per pound; you might get $20 per pound.”

The pair created Boardsort.com for individuals and companies to sell, discuss and learn about e-scrap pricing.

Transparency is paramount

Electronic scrap prices are listed on the Boardsort website and regularly updated, something Skeeles says was uncommon in the early 2010s.

The pricing index features a five-color tagging system, with each color representing a material’s desirability.

Green-tagged items are considered focus materials, those that provide the maximum return for the least amount of effort invested, according to Boardsort. Parts from desktop and laptop computers, for example, are focus items.

Yellow-tagged items could need cleaning or additional processing to improve their value. Examples of additional processing could include removing a bracket from a gold finger card or cleaning a heat sink from a circuit board.

Blue-tagged materials are deemed complex items and include wire wrap pin boards, high-grade telecoms and any cellphone with a battery. The Boardsort website says these items must be examined on a piece-by-piece basis because they present too many variables.

When the value of an item has been irreparably lost from overprocessing, it’s given an orange tag.

“Had you not cut that finger off that stick of RAM [random access memory], it would have paid more” as a complete component, Skeeles offers as an example.

Red-tagged items, the last category in the index, are not accepted and labeled “do not send.” These items could carry a fee to collect and process and include lithium-ion laptop and cellphone batteries.

Boardsort’s pricing index was developed not only to provide guidance for electronics scrappers but also to ensure items maintain their maximum value.

“How can we have our customer do things in a way that works for both of us?” Skeeles asks. “Whether it’s the pricing, whether it’s the grading, whether it’s the transparency and the honesty—the education itself.”

Consumers can take their e-scrap education into their own hands through the Boardsort public message forums.

“Back in the day, we were just a small company… and didn’t have a lot of time to dedicate to answering the plethora of questions that we were being bombarded with on our website,” he explains. “The nice thing about our forums, and where this is really a tool for everyone, is the handful of volunteers we have.”

With more than 34,000 posts across multiple topics ranging from general e-scrap identification to tips and techniques for acquiring, processing and selling e-scrap, the forums have created a community within the Boardsort website.

“There are a lot of folks who really find enjoyment looking at all these circuit boards and just trying to figure out how they fit within the puzzle,” Skeeles says. “You post a picture on our forums, and someone’s reporting back almost immediately with an answer as to what it is they see.”

The company also manages a YouTube channel featuring educational videos and tutorials about different e-scrap types.

In January, Boardsort began uploading videos aimed at new scrappers looking to break into electronics recycling.

“Our educational videos are very popular, and we are adding to them on a regular basis,” he says.

One of the site’s upcoming videos will cover the finer points of shipping, documentation, packaging and transportation.

Consistency is key

While Boardsort offers walk-in services that are available to the public, Skeeles says the largest and fastest growing segment of its customer base is commercial recyclers. Typically, these businesses are small- to midsized yards big enough to obtain material but without the volume or technology to break it down to the grade necessary to advance it to the next level of recycling.

Boardsort offers a sort-and-settle program for these commercial accounts, allowing customers to send purchased e-scrap to Boardsort for grading and sorting.

“We produce an itemized ticket of what was found in the box and pay our highest sorted material rate, minus a 10 percent sort fee,” Skeeles says.

Once the material is sorted and deemed suitable for processing, its next destination usually is a smelter.

According to Skeeles, most of the company’s traffic comes from Ohio and neighboring states Michigan, Indiana and Pennsylvania, though Boardsort also works with a number of California-based companies.

“We do a lot of business in states that are not friendly to this type of thing,” he says. “We find that regulations allow businesses [in states with e-scrap laws] to collect to a certain point, but then they have to move that material. They don’t have the ability to process further.”

Boardsort sorts and processes material manually, providing additional cleaning to acquired materials on its labor line. The company has three forklifts to move material across the Alliance property, while employees do most of the physical work short of transporting shipments.

Because of the amount of physical labor, Skeeles says safety always is top of mind.

“Right now, our concern is the up-and-coming battery problems that we’re all going to be experiencing as we’re moving to an electrified society,” he explains. “We see a lot of [batteries].”

To mitigate the risk of a thermal event caused by lithium-ion batteries, the company has focused on isolating those it receives through inbound shipments. Forty-foot ventilated shipping containers line the perimeter of the property and are used to house these batteries.

“Should there be a problem, at least the batteries themselves are isolated from our building, our inventory and, of course, our staff,” Skeeles says.

Although the price of gold has played a role in Boardsort’s success, consistency also is key.

“My customers want to know that they can purchase this material at a certain price and trust that I’m going to pay them when it comes time to pay them,” Skeeles says. “You have to be consistent in your pricing and grading.”

Boardsort continues to grow, with an additional warehouse and set of offices in development at its 4.5-acre Alliance property slated for completion in June. It broke ground on the expansion, which has been a learning experience, in February.

“It has been a real education with respect to dealing with the regulations, zoning and all of the other considerations that go into building a facility such as this,” he says. “Once we received our final approval from the powers that be, we wasted no time getting busy.”

The author is digital editor of the Recycling Today Media Group and can be reached at tkazdin@gie.net.