Ask HN: Is anyone making money from garbage? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is anyone making money from garbage?

20 pointstheguild37 comments

Could You Be The Next Banana King? http://cbpowerandindustrial.wordpress.com/2013/04/10/you-could-be-the-next-banana-king/ is based on the real-life story of Samuel Zemurray, who started out penniless but built an empire on discarded bananas.

It's given me the idea to look for money where other people see only waste.

My question is twofold: is there anyone on HN making money from refuse or have any ideas / know of any stories of people who are?

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There're tons of garbage collection mom-and-pop companies serving small and rural neighborhoods. Believe it or not, they need software to run their business, and the current one sucks. Most of software designed for garbage collectors is just a simple ugly-looking billing software, but how about (1) Something very user-friendly that looks like it was made in 21st century? (2) The ability for customers to see a portal where they can manage their account and pay the bill and, MOST IMPORTANTLY (3) The ability for the software to optimize routes for garbage trucks, so they can eat less gas and collect garbage faster, thus reducing labor costs. Right now #3 is based purely on human decisions, which is probably wrong. I'll bet you #3 would sell well, especially if it was integrated with the other parts.

Are you referring to normal garbage collection or recycling centers? In my area, garbage collection is done by a pretty large company. They have a decent online presence which allows me to pay my bill there etc.

I'm always on the lookout for viable b2b opportunities. Do you have domain knowledge of this? Would love to hear more. I would email you but no contact info. Shoot me an email if you're not too busy. Email is in the profile.

I, too, am interested in this domain. Please email :)

I work for a company who sells a Garbage Collection log analyser if that counts!

http://www.jclarity.com/products/censum/

I´ve always thought that someday there would be a way to use old dumpers (or even actual ones, although some of them have a good recycle system) as a source of raw materials. After all there are some decades of waste accumulation there and proper recycling is relatively recent. It could be a new kind of mining. I don´t know the composition data on old garbage, so maybe is not worth the effort. For example I imagine that iron and copper was well recycled and reused even 100 years ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landfill_mining

As always they read my mind!. Thank you. It'll be interesting to know how profitable it is.

Check out Sanergy. They're collecting human waste using custom toilets in Nairobi slums, and selling fertilizer and electricity.

http://saner.gy

Welcome to India, a BBC TV programme, shows people making money by sweeping dirt on the roads of a jewellery district in Colcuta and recovering the gold. (Indian housewives have a staggering amount of physical gold.)

When those sweepings are running thin they go into the drains to gather sludge. Gold from jeweller's bodies and on the floors get washed into the drains. This sludge requires a lot of processing to get the gold, so the sludge is sold to a business with the man-power to do it.

They need to grind and dry the sludge. They then slowly wash it over ribbed troughs - the gold stays in the ribs while the dirt washes over. The gold-rich sludge is processed with mercury, glass, soda, and ash. This is melted in a crucible, to give you a gold / silver / mercury blob, which you then process with acid to get gold.

Later I'll put up some short clips of the video showing the various processes because my description isn't good and the programmes are no longer available online. But here's the BBC page for it. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01n8278)

If you don't mind travelling to Ghana you could surely do better than they're doing in Accra - Here's a snippet from a UK TV programme about the e-waste dump in Agbogbloshie. It's pretty depressing. There's no kind of sensible plan to recovering useful stuff. Seeing a boy smashing polyester / polystyrene capacitors off an old PCB with a rock is just grim. I guess by this point you just treat it the ground like ore - dig it up and process it.

(http://videobam.com/rcEUM) (Apologies for the awful video host. Any suggestions?) Here's a link to the original programme (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00sch78)

Was just writing pretty much the same comment but you beat me to it....

There's a short clip from the BBC programme on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-dsGzgjkjA

Found this in the similar videos, great watch! https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&...

Scrappers are doing it every day. Back in an earlier time my wife's aunt and uncle used to drive a truck into Denver and pick up the food waste from area hotels to feed their hogs (when this wasn't forbidden by the USDA). The newspaper group I worked for at one time threw out a LOT of waste newsprint and I knew someone that would stop by the dumpsters daily to gather it and then make pots to grow seedlings in. There is a regular crew of people around here that pick up unwanted pallets and simply haul them to another site where they are in demand (in the same city).

As with everything else in business you find someone who needs X and then see if you can locate a source for a price that allows you to make money.

shakes fist

Ah, you guys, sending me off on a research quest about Sam Zemurray, who I'd never heard of before today!

Google Books has an issue of Life magazine with a big profile of him: http://books.google.com/books?id=2EsEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA92&#...

An issue of The Rotarian mentions him: http://books.google.com/books?id=HUYEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA14&#...

It seems he's part of the entire "banana republic" thing.

CNBC has a whole program on people who do: Trash Inc. The Secret Life of Garbage

http://www.cnbc.com/id/38830389

I haven't seen it, but they promote it heavily for the days that there is no trading.

Humid waste is hugely untreated in many countries. It seems like the way to go because it doesn't burn well and it's 30% of the urban waste.

Tech is there. Issues are mostly:

1. Margins. Transporting this stuff with a low volume/value ratio around too much will make you unprofitable very fast 2. Politics and mafia (yes, mafia, try collecting garbage in South Italy) 3. Capex and investment payback

I think that due to points 1, 2 and 3 you need:

a. Small plants that can be profitable with waste from 2000 inhabitants up b. To provide some sort of benefit for the inhabitants. If you go in a country where the tax on waste is managed by the city hall you have a go there

An Australian self-made millionaire made his riches from waste and recycling. You can read about him and his company here:

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/dial-a-dump-sydneys-30... (The Telegraph is hardly Australia's best paper but for the purposes of answering your question I'd say it suffices).

I believe he deals mainly in industrial waste. Google his name (Ian Malouf) to get a fuller picture of his business practices.

In Sweden garbage creates energy. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/10/28/163823839/swe...

Iceland extracts methane to fuel cars from it's garbage but I think the yield is pretty low: http://www.or.is/English/EnergyandEnvironment/Methane/

Also in South-East London: http://www.selchp.com/

Tons of people are making money from waste. The last example I have in mind is a guy that created a hugely successful business in France last year.

What he does is basically just taking all the waste that comes of workers building houses. Then he sells it to the weight.

The magic is that he gets paid by the building companies so that they can leave the site a few days earlier, and he gets paid for the waste he brings back to the factories. Epic win win situation.

Only thing needed to start is a truck, and a few spare hours a week.

I know a guy who has people send him photos of their junked cars and he uploads them to various forums/boards and sells them. Gets a commission for every car sold through it. He is not rich, but does all right. And that's one of the worst kind of trash/garbage out there: junked cars.

Classmate's dad in middle school presented on this. Not sure what happened to the company or if it took off. Loved the ideas as a kid.

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-10-26-100379...

Garbage is a Mafia standard: http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2013/01/feds_charge_32_alle...

Linda Katz?

http://www.business-opportunities.biz/2013/04/10/the-worlds-...

A friend of mine runs Compost Now (http://compostnow.org/). Very cool business, but not without its challenges from what I can tell.

Food Recovery Network | Fighting Waste, Feeding People http://www.foodrecoverynetwork.org

Old phrase in UK:

"Where there's muck, there's brass."

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/408900.html

With the attitude that one person's trash is another person's gold, then almost anything is trash - recently a supermarket chain in the UK saw a 5% drop in profits so rushed out a "here is what we are doing to fix it" - including firing 700 people that had been employed in their headquarters - to count the money from the tills. They are being replaced with some cash counting machines. You know like the ones in supermarkets that give you vouchers for coins.

Reyclebank[1] comes to mind

[1]https://www.recyclebank.com/

Garbage is not garbage if it makes you rich. Garbage is garbage only if you find it worthless. o_O

The thing is, there's always someone who can make money from garbage.

There's an old saying from my Yorkshire roots, 'Where there's muck there's brass'.

"One man's trash is another man's treasure."

"one animal's effluent is a rich man's delicacy."

ok, I'm done.

So if one person is worthless, his garbage would be called garbage-ception!!

Apple?

I mean, Apple Inc. not discarded apples...

zen robotics

The article referenced, clickable: http://cbpowerandindustrial.wordpress.com/2013/04/10/you-cou...

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