Establishing an e-scrap standard

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

For 14 years, the company has worked to shed light on electronic scrap prices, enhancing the level of transparency and knowledge for buyers and sellers alike.

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

Its motto—"learn, sell, profit"—applies to itself and its customers.

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

What started in 2010 as a two-person operation has since grown to 14 employees and two locations. Boardsort specializes in buying and processing scrap circuit boards and computer chips, as well as other used electronics. The company is headquartered in Alliance, Ohio, with an additional warehouse in Wickliffe, Ohio, for storing outbound shipments and facilitating public drop-offs.

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

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

As the demand grew for electronics recycling services, Skeeles and co-founder Bruce Opdahl identified a need in the market 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.”

From there, the pair developed Boardsort.com—a place for consumers to sell, discuss and learn about the pricing of e-scrap.

Transparency is paramount

E-scrap prices are posted to the Boardsort website and updated regularly, which 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 prime focus items, which provide the maximum return for the least amount of effort invested, according to the Boardsort website. Parts from desktop and laptop computers are considered focus items.

Yellow-tagged items may 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 heatsink from a circuit board.

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

When the value of an item has been irreparably lost due to over-processing, 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 complete,” Skeeles explains.

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

Boardsort’s pricing index was developed to not only 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?” he 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,” Skeeles 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 33,000 posts across multiple topics ranging from general e-scrap identification discussions 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,” he adds. “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 the different types of electronic scrap.

Starting in January 2025, Boardsort will upload weekly videos aimed at new scrappers looking to break into electronics recycling.

Consistency is key

While Boardsort offers walk-in services 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 mid-size yards big enough to obtain the 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, which allows 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 is usually a smelter.

Skeeles says most of the company’s traffic comes from Ohio and its neighboring states—Michigan, Indiana and Pennsylvania—but that Boardsort also works with a fair number of companies based in California.

“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 property, while employees do the physical work short of transporting shipments.

Due to the amount of physical labor, Skeeles says safety is always 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 a battery, the company has focused on isolating those received through inbound shipments. Forty-foot ventilated shipping containers line the perimeter of the property to house batteries.

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

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.”

Today, 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 2025.