Average printed circuit board price stabilizes

Average printed circuit board price stabilizes

By Editorial Staff, Resource Recycling

The April average price for printed circuit boards continued to meander below the $8 mark at $7.78 per pound, down 2.1 percent from the March total. What's more, despite reaching an all-time high of $8.47 per pound last August, April's average price was just 3.0 percent above its year-earlier value.

To date, the price of scrap circuit boards has averaged $7.88 per pound, up 8.4 percent over the 2011 YTD average. Compared to March, all metals used in the calculating the PWB index saw across-the-board declines this past month.

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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