Successful small C/C refiners vs. BIG C/C REFINERS...realistically, now tell me which are you wanting to be?

There are big boys in this C/C "game" who only know how to do things in cargo container sizes.  Since that is the biz model that works for them, they don't give credence to any other way to make money in this C/C converter processing.  They brag about doing 1000 to 3000 cats per month.  That's all they know.  Cut/Containerize/Ship/collect 3-5%

While there is a place in this world for large scale OPERATORS, there is a very convincing SMALL FOOTPRINT biz model for those whose budgets are way more modest. Most of us entrepreneurs hav more things to do in life besides smoking the fat cigars and paying immigrant laborers $5 per hour to remove C/Cs from junked cars hauled into their junkyards.  But hey, if cigars are your thing, GO FOR IT!  

Many other small footprint entrepreneurs--myself included--are living proof this is doable.

Truth is, I know of one man who only harvests the easiest metal to get out--the palladium-- by wet solvent chemistry on a small scale.  He scrounges about 10 to 25 a month, at least that's what he told me. Yes, he's retired. Yes, he's on a fixed SS chk.  But he's smart, independent, in his early 70s now, and has always worked at doing something.  This is how he supplements his SS check.

After he rinses his residue well, he dries it and pours it into drums.  Since he's a SMALL, one man operation, about once every 3 months, he loads his drums of dried residue into the back of his pickup, and hauls them into a nearby refiner.  This is how HE's figured out how to get paid for the platinum and the rhodium from his dried residue that he left behind.  Then he goes back home, and starts the cycle all over while he waits for his refiner's check.  He's never told me what he is doing with the palladium he harvests, and truthfully I don't care.  But I have a pretty good idea where it goes. (The palladium HE gets first gets added to his growing savings and then he supplements his SS check for ordinary living expenses.)

The fact of the matter is, for every large OPERATOR out there beating the bushes for cargo sized container quantities of cats on a monthly basis, there are about 1000 small entrepreneurs out in the big wide world, making a decent monthly income from all the C/Cs that fall through the "cracks."  The "rolling mine" of automotive C/Cs has been in full production for over 30 years now.  Only a fraction of them are being processed by any operator, large or small!

There are ALWAYS ways to legitimately make a buck for the small footprint entrepreneur C/C refiner/processor.  All successful ones are doing so, at LOW processing costs.   

Many ask, what about waste management?  Excellent question!  Let me break the news to you gently. 

You already know it takes scientifically solid "chemistry" to put the 3 precious metals INTO a C/C in the first place, right?  Does it not stand to reason, that ALL IT TAKES is sound scientific DEMANUFACTURING CHEMISTRY to get the wastes back out again??  That's just another way of saying, "what is sauce for the goose, is also sauce for the gander." 

Does it not seem logical that the very same chemistry used to treat C/C manufacturing waste in the first place is ALSO the same chemistry needed to treat the waste solids and solutions generated by the entrepreneurial processor??  All we're talking about here is taking "biggie sizing science" and right sizing it down for small processors! We're not talking rocket science here, okay?