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Comment by bserge | Hacker News Reader

I've always wondered why most household appliances recycling factories don't sell the parts, but hey, I'm just a lowly employee, not a CEO getting paid five+ figures a year.

When I looked into it, the most cited reasons were "that's not our business" (really? then what is?) and "it costs more than it's worth" (it doesn't, plus you get government subsidies for green initiatives).

No mention of contracts forbidding that, some manufacturers do forbid resale of whole units, but not of spare parts.

Caterpillar sold/licensed their brand for use in industries they're not competing in, btw, just like many other big companies.

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I once did some work for a junkyard, and their business is a lot more complicated than what I would imagine a recycler has to do. They have to identify, catalog, evaluate the quality of parts. They have to identify cross-reference fitment information. With thousands of different vehicles with thousands of parts each, they’re looking at millions of SKUs. Then they have to inventory, warehouse, market, and manage the sales process for all of those. Even the highly automated tech-savvy junk yard I did work for threw out most of the parts that weren’t high value or high demand, simply because all of the above processes wouldn’t be worth it for a thousands of different $2 parts that don’t have names and are low demand.

Appliances aren’t quite as complicated, but I could still see how it would be a big change from the perspective of how they do business.

The auto junkyards of my childhood left the identification and evaluation of the parts to the customer: the parts were left on the car; the customer located, then removed the part he or she needed, then brought it to the office.

Those junkyards are getting few and far between because of liability insurance costs. Now the parts have to be ordered and pulled off for you, which makes it uneconomical for low value parts. Often, just the high value parts are pulled and the car is crushed.

There's no real distribution system for used appliance spare parts. They just aren't valuable enough to be worth it.

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