The transaction ends when the material leaves your facility. The buyer loads it, signs the paperwork, and drives away. You have a price and a weight. They have the material.
What happens next is something most sellers never find out — and buyers have no incentive to explain.
The Standard Transaction
A recycler or ITAD company sells a batch of mixed PCBs. Category label. Weight. Agreed price per kilogram. The buyer makes an offer, both parties agree, and the material changes hands.
From the seller's perspective, the transaction is complete. From the buyer's perspective, it is just beginning.
The buyer takes the material to a processing facility. The boards go through a shredding and separation process — mechanical, chemical, or pyrometallurgical depending on the operation. Gold, silver, palladium, and copper are separated from the non-metal fraction — the fiberglass, plastics, and ceramics that make up the rest of the board.
The metals are refined. Assayed. Sold to a refinery at current precious metal market prices.
The buyer knows exactly what came out. They have a refinery report showing gold recovered in grams, silver recovered in grams, palladium recovered in grams, copper recovered in kilograms. They know the recovery efficiency of their process. They know what the material was worth after processing.
You received a price per kilogram agreed before any of that happened.
How the Offer Was Calculated
The offer a buyer makes is not a market rate. It is a calculated number.
Before making an offer, a buyer who purchases material at scale has reference data for the material they are buying. They have processed similar batches before and know what they typically yield. They may have commissioned laboratory analysis on specific device types they purchase regularly. They have recovery rates per material category built from processing history.
From that data, they calculate what the batch is worth after processing — total recoverable metal value minus processing costs, refining costs, transport, and their margin. The offer they make is that number, adjusted to ensure they capture value on the transaction.
This is not manipulation. It is how any materials market works when one party has data and the other doesn't. The buyer's offer reflects their knowledge. The gap between what they know and what you know is where the margin sits.
What the Refinery Report Shows
After processing, the buyer receives a refinery report — a certified document showing exactly what was recovered from the batch.
Gold recovered: X grams. Silver recovered: X grams. Palladium recovered: X grams. Copper recovered: X kilograms. Total refined metal value at market prices on the day of settlement: €X.
This document exists. It is standard practice in precious metal refining. Every buyer who processes e-waste at scale receives one.
You never see it.
There is no industry standard requiring buyers to share refinery reports with the sellers who provided the material. The seller's transaction ended at the agreed price per kilogram. What the material actually yielded — and what it was actually worth — remains with the buyer.
What This Means in Practice
Consider a batch of 500 kilograms of mixed PCBs sold at a category average of €8 per kilogram — €4,000 total.
The buyer processes the batch. The refinery report comes back showing gold at 280 ppm average across the batch, silver at 600 ppm, palladium at 12 ppm, copper at 22%. At current precious metal market prices and a 90%+ recovery efficiency, the recovered metal value from that batch is significantly higher than €4,000.
The buyer captures the difference. Not because they deceived anyone — because they had data the seller didn't have, and the offer they made reflected that data.
The seller had a weight and a category label. The buyer had a composition reference and a recovery model. Those are not equivalent starting positions.
Why Buyers Don't Tell You
The information asymmetry in e-waste trading is not accidental. It developed over decades in a market where sellers rarely had the tools or the budget to commission their own composition analysis — and where buyers had every incentive to maintain the advantage that asymmetry provides.
A buyer who shares their composition data and recovery outcomes with sellers is effectively telling sellers what they are undervaluing. That is not in the buyer's interest.
This does not mean every buyer is acting in bad faith. It means the structure of the market — where one side has certified data and the other doesn't — systematically favors the buyer. Individual buyers operating within that structure are simply doing what the market allows.
The pressure to change that structure has to come from the seller side. And it requires sellers to have access to the same layer of data that buyers already use.
What Changes When You Have the Data
When a seller walks into a transaction with certified composition data for the material in their batch, the dynamic changes fundamentally.
They know what the material contains — gold, silver, palladium, copper — in certified ppm values per device type. They know the recovery rate — what percentage of that content can realistically be extracted. They know the current market value of those metals and can calculate a reference price per kilogram based on verified inputs rather than category averages.
The buyer's offer is no longer the only reference point in the room. The seller has their own — documented, traceable, based on the same type of data the buyer uses to calculate their offer.
This doesn't eliminate the buyer's margin. Processing costs, refining costs, transport, and market risk are legitimate factors that buyers price into their offers. But it means the negotiation starts from a documented position rather than from whatever the buyer chooses to offer — and that high-composition material in the batch gets recognized and valued accordingly.
The Refinery Report the Seller Never Sees
The refinery report exists. The data exists. The composition of your material is measurable before it leaves your facility — not just after it has been processed by someone else.
Recovert provides certified metal composition, recovery rate, and market-based pricing per device — the data layer that gives sellers the same starting point buyers already have.
The refinery report your buyer receives after processing your material tells them what it was worth. Recovert tells you before the transaction starts.