About
A-Plus industries has been in the electronics business for 20 years. Our business consists of parts, repair and recycling. We fell into recycling as a means of accumilating parts for resale. We started out focussing on electronic parts like diodes and transistors, but soon started marketting computer related parts as well. Most of our customers are looking for parts not easily found through normal channels. For example, if you needed an AC Adapter for a 5 year old laptop, we’re the place. If you need a AC/DC Converter from Burr Brown, again, that’s us. But if you need a dual core 5 Ghz Cpu to replace in your 1 year old laptop, sorry, not us.
And if you need you laptop or computer fixed for 1/2 the price of Best Buy, Well that’s us too. Hope to see you soon. -Bill
#1 by Betsy on August 25th, 2009
We bring our recycling to A-Plus and I have a question for you. I have read your website and understand the components you reuse but what is done with all the waste that you do not reuse or resell? (ie. the screens from CRT’s, hard drives that have been destroyed, etc.)
Thanks!
#2 by wcook101 on September 2nd, 2009
Betsy,
Thanks for the question. Very little is ever considered waste when dealing with computer recycling. I will be posting a whole new section on our website detailing exactly how the process works. For now I will give you a brief answer to your question. On a computer, everything is recycled. We really don’t need any parts from old computers. What is valuable to us is the motherboard and all the other peripheral cards such as video cards etc. We harvest these items for gold and other metal recycling. That is our primary recycling focus. The computer shell is #2 steel which is very cheap, but it is a commodity as well. Wire and cable is separated and recycled for the copper. A video monitor on the other hand is a bit trickier. Plastic is a petroleum product, so when oil goes up in price so does plastic. But even then it is very cheap. And very light. Making it very cost inefficient to recycle. Even once its bailed and compressed very tightly it still takes up a lot of room for .02 – .04 cent a pound. So this needs to be sold in containers to make any sense. We ship about 50000 pounds of it at a time. The circuit board inside a monitor is also only a copper bearing board, so it too is low grade. But at least there is more weigh by volume with this item. The CRT itself is sent out to a separate contractor who cuts it in half washes the glass and sends it out to be smelted. The glass is leaded and lead at this moment is at one of the highest levels its been at in a long time, thanks mostly to an ongoing war. Hard drives are about 95% aluminum and it is also at about record prices for that commodity. Aluminum is very unexciting, in as much as its price hardly ever changes. this is due to the fact it is one of the earths most abundant naturally occurring metals.
The list goes on, but most electronic gear ends up as one of the above base commodities. I hope this helps. I just read a bit on a competitors website the other day about how recycling for free was impossible. That company claimed it was because companies who claim to recycle for free, do it just sell stuff off, then they get stuck with all the residuals..That’s just ridiculous. We are in this business now for over 19 years. We are in it for the base commodities, Gold, Palladium, Silver, Copper, and Steel. Everything made in the electronic industry is 100% recyclable. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Everyone wants to extract the maximum amount of cash as they can from people good enough to recycle. It’s a dam shame. The bottom line is some companies are not as efficient as we are. Plain and simple. So they have to charge to recycle. They have bloated payrolls and huge overhead. We stay humble and stick to our roots. Serving the community and getting paid by the commodity.