Printed circuit board prices recede in March

By Editorial Staff, Resource Recycling

At $7.94 per pound, the March average price for printed circuit boards was down one percent from the previous month's value.

The slight decrease can be attributed almost exclusively to a 1.5 percent decline in the average price of gold in March. Prices for all other metals that make up the printed wiring board index either held steady or increased a fraction of a percent versus their February value.

The year-over-year per-pound average price for scrap circuit boards was up 8.7 percent in March, with the average price moving up just over two percent since the start of 2012.

This data represents the full metallic values of boards over time and are not the recycling values, as those values do not include the costs involved in actually extracting metal from boards, including freight, sampling charges, assay assessments, smelting, refining, process loss, return on investment, and penalties for various elements, including beryllium, bismuth and nickel.

These values are for the estimated intrinsic metal content of recovered PC boards. Some consumers label such material as mid-value. Lower-value scrap includes monitor and television boards. Higher-value scrap includes network and video cards, and motherboards.

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