I am in the e-waste industry. There are thousands of companies doing this already. This article is written like the BBC just discovered this. While there are many small processors there are also big ones like Arrow Electronics. The hottest item is phones. There is a small shop down the road from me that processes 300K phones a month. They are not capital intensive but are very labor intensive. Most of the money is in reuse. They clean and test the phones, grade them, and sell them on. The non-working ones can have their parts salvaged. The true scrap is sent on to smelters to extract the valuable stuff and dispose of the rest responsibly. Most follow the Responsible Recycling (R2) standard. Some things like cathode ray tube glass has a negative value, meaning you have to pay someone to dispose of it.
E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
41–50 of 84 posts
Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Power consumption is going down with each gen and is big cost driver. Also heat dissipation in data centers is costly. Gotta consider TCO in these cases.
This is almost completely wrong, because Dennard scaling ended around 2002. Power consumption in mainstream CPUs has been a few picojoules per instruction since the Pentium. Even the MSP430 is almost a pJ/insn. Modern ultra-low-power CPUs like the STM32L reach down below 0.3 pJ/insn, as did the LPC1110 a decade ago. Its more mainstream STM32F siblings are still stuck at 1.5 pJ/insn. Research CPUs using exotic logic f…
From that argument, we should be coding everything in hand tuned assembly, because hand tuned assembly gives a 10% to 200% speedup over C.
The number one slowdown I've seen in rendering web pages, were not bad algorithms or bad programming languages, but bad database queries.
And if that's the case, there is a lot more optimization in the DB to be gained than rewriting your back-end to C, say.
Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
#43Literally just met someone for the first time yesterday who is moving to Texas to do this. Apparently, the refresh rate for cloud data centers is now getting down to 2 years or less. Easier to expand by replacing instead of leasing new space. This, combined with how environmentally conscious the big cloud companies are, has led to a big demand in IT Asset Disposal services. Also obviously there are security aspects i…
That's not recycling. That's decommissioning and reselling good hardware.
Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't 15% a pretty good margin? Restaurants & retail make low single digit margins.
On a risk adjusted basis, no. You're buying the raw material assuming aluminum heat sinks will be .67/lb, only to discover that by the time you've liberated the Al from the stream the price has dropped to .40/lb. That just happened. Or, you've invested $30m - $100m in an Ontario e-scrap plant assuming the CADGOV won't reverse its e-scrap policy. Then it does essentially that and the market you thought you had has cha…
> assuming aluminum heat sinks will be .67/lb, only to discover that by the time you've liberated the Al from the stream the price has dropped to .40/lb
Maybe you can use a financial hedging contract to lock in the price of alu?
Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Power consumption is going down with each gen and is big cost driver. Also heat dissipation in data centers is costly. Gotta consider TCO in these cases.
This is almost completely wrong, because Dennard scaling ended around 2002. Power consumption in mainstream CPUs has been a few picojoules per instruction since the Pentium. Even the MSP430 is almost a pJ/insn. Modern ultra-low-power CPUs like the STM32L reach down below 0.3 pJ/insn, as did the LPC1110 a decade ago. Its more mainstream STM32F siblings are still stuck at 1.5 pJ/insn. Research CPUs using exotic logic f…
You're right for CPUs at 100% utilization.
For CPUs at idle, able to turn off power to accessories, power consumption has gone down dramatically over the last decade. True, the curve has been flattening over the last 5 years, but it's still noticeable.
Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
#46Literally just met someone for the first time yesterday who is moving to Texas to do this. Apparently, the refresh rate for cloud data centers is now getting down to 2 years or less. Easier to expand by replacing instead of leasing new space. This, combined with how environmentally conscious the big cloud companies are, has led to a big demand in IT Asset Disposal services. Also obviously there are security aspects i…
This makes zero sense, you can easily resell 2-5 year old server hardware at x10-100 raw material worth.
Yes, exactly, for example go to eBay, search for "dell r620 64GB", sort by buy it now. For typical prices of a several year old 1U dual socket server.
Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
#47I am in the e-waste industry. There are thousands of companies doing this already. This article is written like the BBC just discovered this. While there are many small processors there are also big ones like Arrow Electronics. The hottest item is phones. There is a small shop down the road from me that processes 300K phones a month. They are not capital intensive but are very labor intensive. Most of the money is in…
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Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
On a risk adjusted basis, no. You're buying the raw material assuming aluminum heat sinks will be .67/lb, only to discover that by the time you've liberated the Al from the stream the price has dropped to .40/lb. That just happened. Or, you've invested $30m - $100m in an Ontario e-scrap plant assuming the CADGOV won't reverse its e-scrap policy. Then it does essentially that and the market you thought you had has cha…
> assuming aluminum heat sinks will be .67/lb, only to discover that by the time you've liberated the Al from the stream the price has dropped to .40/lb Maybe you can use a financial hedging contract to lock in the price of alu?
Typically the volumes are relatively small, which makes it’s expensive to hedge.
It’s a penny game. If you are making a 35% spread on your buy/sell the one time inventory depreciation will definitely hurt, but your spread and net pennies per pound has also gone down substantially as well.
Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
#49Literally just met someone for the first time yesterday who is moving to Texas to do this. Apparently, the refresh rate for cloud data centers is now getting down to 2 years or less. Easier to expand by replacing instead of leasing new space. This, combined with how environmentally conscious the big cloud companies are, has led to a big demand in IT Asset Disposal services. Also obviously there are security aspects i…
> moving to Texas to do this. Why Texas? Are there lots of data centres there? If so, is that an energy cost thing, because it seems a place with greater cooling requirements?
Great tax environment for running a reseller.
Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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-space…
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.