Printed circuit board prices tumble

Printed circuit board prices tumble

By Editorial Staff, Resource Recycling

After stabilizing in April, the May average price for printed circuit boards plummeted to $7.45 per pound, down 4.3 percent from April and down 4.4 percent since the start of the year. Despite a mini-bubble in printed circuit board pricing last fall, where average scrap circuit board prices hit a record high of $8.31 per pound, prices are down approximately 1 percent versus May of last year.

The year-to-date average price of scrap circuit boards, at $7.79 per pound, is 6.5 percent higher than the corresponding five month average in 2011, which totaled $7.31 per pound.

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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