The recycling process leading up to re-melting or re-use

First of all, you must fill out our collection form, including your estimated quantities of material to be picked up. We will then get in touch with you one or two days before the collection, to confirm the date and time.

Once the material has arrived at our warehouse, a qualified technician does a first sorting of the material, separating PCs that are still good for resale from material to be dismantled for its metals (gold, copper, aluminum, iron, lead, etc.).

Any material that is deemed good enough for re-use is then tested by our technicians using professional computer software programs. Then, functional, rebuilt or repaired computers are optimized for re-sale – for example, by increasing the memory, the processor speed and the hard drive capacity. Electronic items that are broken or too old are first dismantled and sorted into categories in our warehouses. For example, we sort all the processors into one category, all the hard drives into another, all the casings (iron) into yet another, and so on.

The processors and memory (the two parts that contain the highest value in metals – gold, silver, palladium, rare-earth metals, etc.) are then manipulated by chemists, who use acids to salvage the precious metals. Material of lower quality, but that is suitable for recycling (such as the iron casing of computers, laptops or electronic devices) is crushed. Later, the scrap iron is sorted by various specialized machines, removing and separating any plastic or other metals. The same process applies to hard drives, in this case primarily to salvage the aluminum found within.

Finally, the metals are re-sold to smelting plants, where they are purified by melting, and finally sold as primary matter.