Payment for rubles – Newspaper Kommersant No. 214 (7415) dated 11/18/2022

In the last six months, the situation in the disposal of equipment has changed: half of the devices now come without electronic boards. Market participants say that the number of “empty” buildings has increased by 20%. Citizens have begun to actively sell boards on their own, and some companies reuse them due to a shortage of foreign components, or restore and sell them under the guise of new ones. In the meantime, the disposal companies themselves have become more aggravated with the problem of sales: before, most of the boards were sent to European processing companies.

Vladislav Bondarev, director of the Electronics-Utilization SCO association, told Kommersant that over the past six months in Russia, the amount of equipment handed over without electronic boards has increased by about 20% compared to the period before the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine. He noted that citizens often remove other components from equipment, including cables, when handing over for recycling: “The share varies greatly depending on the sources of transfer of equipment. The largest number of handed over equipment without electronic components comes from scrap metal purveyors and assemblers.” According to Mr. Bondarev, citizens and companies began to actively hand over electronic elements separately for the processing of non-ferrous metals.

Dmitry Sorokin, the chief ecologist of another recycling company, PK Vtoralyuminprodukt LLC, specified that now about half of all equipment (consumer electronics, computers, smartphones, etc.) is delivered without electronic components. He believes that “various handicraft industries and civil cooperatives for the processing of circuit boards” are being created in Russia, noting the appearance of many advertisements for their purchase on the Internet. Offers, according to him, appear, for example, on Avito (Kommersant also managed to find them there).

From June to mid-November, customers of the Citilink network handed over almost 65 tons of old equipment, Kommersant was told in the company. The retailer notes that they most often receive refrigerators (46%), washing machines (40%), gas and electric stoves (13%). Network “M.Video-Eldorado” for January-July received about 800 tons of electronic devices. Kommersant talked about a sharp increase in the flow of equipment for recycling in the summer (see Kommersant of July 26).

Some enterprises with a large fleet of electronic equipment take out boards and use them again for their own needs due to the threat of sanctions and a shortage of foreign components, says a Kommersant interlocutor in the market. In Russia, it is also practiced to restore boards, apply new markings to them and sell them under the guise of new ones, another Kommersant interlocutor in the industry adds: “All equipment cases are more or less standardized. Those who buy the boards solder the microcircuits, erase the markings from the cases, and then, having updated the chip legs, they resell it as new.”

In the meantime, the problem of the sales market has aggravated for the utilizers themselves because of the sanctions, Mr. Sorokin adds. According to him, in the past ten years, large buyers have routinely purchased boards from medium and small machinery processing plants, as well as from individuals for subsequent resale to China and Europe: “Mutual settlements were made on an accurate metallurgical yield and at favorable prices.” But even after the start of the pandemic, the export of boards from Russia decreased, which was also facilitated by the refusal of the Ministry of Industry and Trade to issue export licenses, and subsequently the ban on the export of precious metal scrap from the Russian Federation, Mr. Sorokin clarifies.

“Russian processing enterprises are left to either work with refineries or with processing enterprises producing precious metal scrap concentrate,” the expert explains. He says that it is unprofitable to supply boards to Russian refineries, since the precious metals contained in the boards are not a priority raw material for these plants and they do not have equipment for working with metal deposition on board elements.

Timofey Kornev