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Shoutout to the guy at the e-waste recycling center who let me dig through the bins | Electronics Repairers - Free To Speak

sethfoster•4mo ago

Shoutout to the guy at the e-waste recycling center who let me dig through the bins

I was at the county dump last Tuesday and found six working power supplies and a stack of motherboards with intact capacitors just sitting in a pile of crushed monitors, so if you're burning through components like I am, check your local facility before you spend another $40 on shipping.

3 comments

3 Comments

jadej504mo ago

Gently push back on something here, @angelaw78. That Vice article was mostly talking about gold in circuit boards and connectors, not just any old e-waste. You can't just pop open a VCR and find gold flakes laying around. The real treasure is the copper, aluminum, and rare earth metals inside the components. But your point about working hardware getting tossed is totally spot on. I've pulled out whole desktop computers that just needed a new power button or a fresh Windows install. People swap out perfectly fine RAM sticks just to go from 16GB to 32GB without needing to. It's wild how little most folks know about what they're throwing away.

angelaw784mo ago

Did you see that Vice article last month about how e-waste centers are finding literal gold in old electronics? Ngl it makes total sense that some places just let people dig through the stuff before it gets shredded. Honestly I've been telling my buddies for years to hit up the local dump before buying new parts. The amount of perfectly good PSUs and RAM that get tossed is insane. Tbh it's kind of wild how much working hardware ends up in the trash just because people upgraded to the latest thing.

valc914mo ago

RIGHT? That hits me hard because "perfectly good PSUs and RAM" is EXACTLY what I see. I found a barely used Seasonic power supply last year that was like 2 years old, just sitting in a bin at the recycling center cause someone swapped it for a modular one. People really do throw away working stuff just to have the newest model, it's such a waste. Makes me want to start my own little salvage operation out of my trunk.