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Comment by guywithaphone | Hacker News Reader

I've tried both metals, refurbish and parts recycling...

Refurbishing or selling for parts is MUCH more valuable than metals recycling. It's also MUCH MUCH more work.

Three first problem is getting valuable E-waste at a good price. (Free or cheap in large quantities) then comes separating out older parts (higher gold content), then identifying and testing newer parts for refurbishing or parts sales. Then advertising refurb or parts, then the sale, then support for the items you sold.

While there are a LOT of parts in closets, basements or other storage, it is difficult to obtain products that have a high resale value at the right price.

Then factor in that newer computers and phones are getting much faster and/or using less power.

Also, recycling does have risks-- including dust, toxic fires, and safe disposal.

It's not impossible to make money recycling/refurbishing, but it is difficult and usually requires scale.

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It's quite tempting considering the tons of stuff thrown out.

I think with a small team of quite knowledgeable people you can have different revenue streams

    - stupid repairs (failing buttons, so common)
    - parts (where the team would be here to create test tooling)
    - materials (here you'd need chemistry knowledge)

I'd love that but I admit it's not easy and can be risky (never injured myself more than since I started scavenging parts)

I've thought about this as a commercial operation in the UK; but TBH I can't see that you could make enough money from it. However, it does seem to serve a very useful function in society, and would be something I'd want to fund through government - but it goes against commercial interests (people with repairs don't buy as much stuff).

We're getting some charities working to help people make repairs, some maker-spaces and such that facilitate people doing it themselves, etc..

It's not impossible to make a living refurbishing electronics... the big problem isn't fixing the electronics. It's gathering them, selling them, and supporting sold electronics.

Some people do a great job. Check out recraigslist.com and applianceschool.com (same person runs both) for examples of how to refurb/ flip large appliances at scale.

The blind center of lad Vegas is another successful organisation that refurbished at scale.

Computer repair and cell phone repair stores are another example of successful refurbishing at scale...

One of the biggest problems is that individuals and businesses hoard old electronics... Loss aversion (the fear of losing something perceived as valuable) is a big reason that more electronics aren't refurbished or recycled. Fear of data theft is another, smaller reason that more electronics aren't recycled.

In the end, there are a lot of pros and a lot of cons to this business... because it is difficult to be consistently successful, there is a lot of opportunity. There are a lot of ways to make money in the recycling industry. Finding and developing a niche that other people can't or don't want to do-- that has a high upside -- can be a great way to make a good living.

If you want to jump on, there is little risk --- mostly just a trip to the metals yard.

Then factor in that newer computers and phones are getting much faster and/or using less power.

This part is hard for me, as a big proponent of "reduce, reuse, recycle." Reduce isn't that hard until your technology becomes obsolete. Reuse is typically impossible because people don't throw out technology until it's obsolete. So recycling is the only option left.

>people don't throw out technology until it's obsolete

People throw out computers (including screens and everything) because the mouse stopped working, or the power supply needs replacing or the computer got a virus. A washing machine needs a new door-seal, a cooker needs a new light, people actually throw out that sort of stuff. Ebay has helped to make a market for junk, but oftentimes it seems people over-estimate the financial value of their used stuff and that hinders reuse in favour of replacement.

« A door seal’s gonna cost as much as a new machine sir. » Every repairman.

It’s a difficult economic issue. Suitably skilled repairmen only exist medium economies, where we produce enough income to teach youngsters soldering, but when the economy is not developed as much as to have marketers take the power over the makers (think Juicero). In the Western economy today, repairmen are more salesmen on the field than actual people capable of repairing anything. I’ve never seen one actually repairing an appliance.

I have my doubt whether it’s really the machines getting built in such a way that repairs are impossible, oftentimes it does seem like a little more search could have found the defective wire, but let’s be honest, if they want to survive in a big city, soldering won’t pay enough. And that’s where the economy is surprising. Somehow those repairman jobs have higher hourly rates than replacing the machine, meaning shipping a new 50-kg appliance across the world is less costly than shipping a repairman across New York.

That's really just economy of scale at work, right? Shipping one repair man to a single location is less efficient than shipping ten thousand units from a factory to a distribution center. Servicing all of your customers (new and old) with the same mechanism is more efficient than having different mechanisms for new (sales & delivery) and old (repair).

I don't know about appliances, but the last few times I tried to repair a failed electronic device I found them to be un-repairable by design.

It is so frustrating to know that all something likely needs is a small surface component, but you can't repair it. Usually this is due to components being epoxied or dipped for seemingly no reason. At least thanks to ebay, you can sometimes find a duplicate broken device that can be harvested for whole PCBs.

People don’t throw out technology until it’s obsolete for THEM. There are tiers of consumers across the world for whom obsolete is defined at different stages of functionality/performance/affordability/etc.

Does "Obsolete" only apply to consumer grade applications though? Can there be a market for refurbishing old phones, laptops etc for IoT controllers that don't need massive processing power?

hmmm, I worked at google when they were doing a drive upgrade. They couldn't erase 100,000 hard drives (it would take years of time in the eraser machines) so they had to destroy them, which I assume meant melting them and eventually extracting the gold.

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