About this guide

Microscrapping exists because most of the numbers circulating about precious metals in electronics are wrong, usually by a factor of ten, and usually in the direction that sells something.

Where the data comes from

Yields are drawn from three kinds of source, in roughly this order of trust:

1. Measured results from refining communities — people who processed a known weight and weighed what came out. These are the best figures available for most categories and they are what the high-confidence entries rest on.
2. Peer-reviewed characterisation studies — ICP-OES and similar assays published in materials and recycling journals. Excellent precision, but often on depopulated or comminuted material, which is not the same thing as what you are holding.
3. Published refiner rates and buy tables — what commercial buyers actually pay, which acts as a sanity check. If a claimed yield implies a metal value far above what any refiner will pay per pound, the claim is wrong.

Where no measurement exists, figures are calculated from published construction specifications — plating thickness times contact area times density — and labelled as such.

Confidence labels

Every component carries one:

• High — multiple concordant measurements from independent sources.
• Medium — one solid source, or a defensible calculation cross-checked against market prices.
• Low — an estimate. Treat it as a starting point for your own testing, not a quote.

What this guide will not do

It will not tell you that scrapping is more profitable than it is. A large fraction of the entries here exist specifically to say this is not worth your time — hard drive platters, spark plugs, film capacitors, board surface plating. That is the most useful thing a guide like this can do.

It also will not walk you through acid refining. For nearly everyone the correct move is to sort, concentrate and sell to a licensed refiner who recovers 85–98%, assays rather than guesses, and carries the waste liability. Your edge is identification and sorting, not chemistry.

Corrections

If a number here is wrong, it should be fixed. Measured results are especially welcome — if you processed a known weight and weighed the output, that is worth more than any published estimate. Get in touch.

Prices

Metal prices in this guide reflect 4 Aug 2026 and move constantly. The offline app lets you enter current spot prices and recalculates everything. Refiner payout tables lag the metal markets, sometimes badly — always re-check before shipping anything that matters.