I am wanting to start a recycling business focusing on electronic waste such as audio equipment, test equipment, medical equipment and similar. There are plenty of businesses focusing on computer and television e-waste in Australia due to the national computer and television scheme where importers and manufacturers of TVs and computers contribute to the recycling of these products. Not a lot happening though for the other electronic products.
My 'Why' is simple.

1. Less electronic waste going to landfill.
2. Jobs for people who would otherwise have trouble finding work
3. Being part of the solution and driving change
4. Being my own boss

Scrapyards can deal with the metals recovered. Plastic can potentially be pelletised and glass can be recycled also.

Not only do I want to break down equipment into the different metals, plastic and glass, I want to sell components which are hard to find as brand new items at your local electronics store. Those components include stepper motors, CD spindle motors, gears, potentiometers, switches and relays. Okay, pots are easy to buy at the local shop but I don't always like what is on offer. Stepper motors from CD/DVD drives can be seen on YouTube videos attached to an Arduino for projects such as mini CNC machines, LASER drawing machines and 3D scanners.

I am asking you, do you believe there could be a market for components recovered from equipment?
Please let me know your thoughts.

There are other uses for some items. Art and craft folk may see bits and pieces as useful in their artwork. I have made mini sculptures from bits I have found.

 

Do you believe there could be a market for components recovered from equipment?

Only on a market place like ebay, where the parts are clearly described as ‘used’.

Main stream manufacturers need to know that the parts they are using will provide reliable service, and need them to be available in reasonable quantities – which your proposed operation could not provide.

I suggest you take a look on ebay for the type of components you are considering recycling, and see what prices they are asking.

 

Further to my above post – I have sold electrical parts (used) that were being otherwise junked by my employer.

I had a number of 3 Pole mains relays (rated at 10A) with their base.

I was selling them (relay & base) for £10 on ebay with free p&p – after postage costs and ebay’s fees I reckon I made around £5 for each one sold; enough to buy me a beer.

 

your local electronics store.

That's a dying breed in many countries, alas.
As Hymie indicates, manufacturers will be looking for bulk buys of reliable components, which will need to be of known provenance (think product liability issues), so your customers would only be hobbyists. By the time you account for overheads such as the labour cost of dismantling and separating the scrap, storage and distribution costs etc I suspect your profit margin would be negative. A pity, because we'd all like to do our bit to save the planet.
I don't see this working as a large-scale commercial operation, but it could as a personal venture.

 

Welcome to AAC.

Let me start by saying that I don't intend to be discouraging, rather to inject some realism into the situation to help you analyze the chances of success. We all suffer from confirmation bias, and while there is a very high failure rate for new small businesses, they don't all fail. The question is, how can you judge your chances so you can choose to take whatever the risk turns out to be.

Scrapyards can deal with the metals recovered. Plastic can potentially be pelletised and glass can be recycled also.

Last I knew, the market for e-waste wasn't local recycling, rather it was being sold to Chinese buyers who scavenged components over charcoal fires using child and other cheap labor, and no safety considerations.

The very cheap labor is a material point because to make it profitable they couldn't pay more than what amounts to around a dollar a day to the workers.

The safety concerns surely included burns from open fires, but there us more. In particular, while there are some "useful" bits on the boards, there is also actual toxic waste. Some of that disappears as aerosols and gases, but you'll need protection for workers and almost certainly some kind of filtration to prevent release to the atmosphere.

The toxic metals, and left over PCBs, which are not amenable to recycling will become something you are going to have to pay to dispose of, and that's a cost that has to be factored in.

As far as "good" metallic content, there will be gold, of course, and it is actually fairly common for people to recover gold plating from e-waste. There may be recoverable copper as well, which is reasonably valuable, as well as some silver. But, all of these things have to be practically extracted. Unless you can find a partner willing to buy the stripped PCBs, you will have to do that yourself which is an entire enterprise by itself.

The idea of plastic and glass recycling brings up the topic of sorting. Neither "plastic" nor "glass" are a singular thing. For recycled polymers to have value, they will have to be in a form that can be used more cheaply than virgin stock. That you can manage this when the input to your process is variable and not necessarily reliable is unclear.

You would have to be able to ensure that whatever stock you were able to recover was what it was labeled. You might be able to find a partner set up to recycle such things who would buy housings already stripped of metallic and other foreign material, but that only seems likely for cases like, for example, a lot of 1000 devices with ABS cases that you can strip down to just the polymer.

Glass is another issue. The glass used in, say iPhone screens is quite specific, even among different models. A mix of these exotic glasses is unlikely to have a market. You will never get a very high volume of glass, which might make a mix more useful as simple feed stock for random glass making, because phone screens are small. You would also need to very carefully sort the screens by model and year to be able to offer clean, single glass types to a potential buyer of exotic glass for recycling—I don't even know if they exist.

Not only do I want to break down equipment into the different metals, plastic and glass, I want to sell components which are hard to find as brand new items at your local electronics store. Those components include stepper motors, CD spindle motors, gears, potentiometers, switches and relays. Okay, pots are easy to buy at the local shop but I don't always like what is on offer. Stepper motors from CD/DVD drives can be seen on YouTube videos attached to an Arduino for projects such as mini CNC machines, LASER drawing machines and 3D scanners.

As far as component recovery, you have a similar problem. Unless you can find a way to make one and two-piece sales profitable you will have to find job lots of many of the same item to strip. In the case of motors, servos, steppers, and the like you will be competing against sellers on sites like AliExpress who are offering new versions of these devices, almost certainly for less than you could offer the recycled ones.

The hobbyist/experimental market doesn't seem like it could possibly be large enough to sustain a business. I think you might be able to make a small profit stripping out the main boards from optical drives and selling them to hobbyists for disassembly themselves, as in the videos. It seems unlikely you could afford to strip out the parts and sell them for enough to pay for that labor.

My 'Why' is simple.

1. (1) Less electronic waste going to landfill.
2. (2) Jobs for people who would otherwise have trouble finding work
3. (3) Being part of the solution and driving change
4. (4) Being my own boss

So, very briefly

1. Maybe, but you will still have to work out what to do with the very worst bits of the waste. This could be an opportunity to innovate some new way to deal with it, and that would be nice.

2. It remains to be seen that you can get sufficient supplies of e-waste of the sort that could pay to employ people at a fair wage and operate at a profit. I don't know what research you have done on the current recycling efforts, but this is a well established business segment and unless you have extensive experience in it, and have identified specific opportunities that are profitable, or new ways to make it so, it seems a naive (if not laudable) aspiration that is unlikely to succeed.

3. This is very nice. It would be a good thing. But the vague ideas of "reducing landfill contribution" and "providing employment" doesn't seem to be enough to suggest that your business could do this. I think you probably need to evaluate this point more rigorously and see if you can make some concrete proposals about effecting change if you want this to "count".

4. It's hard enough to be an employee in a start-up, being a boss is incredibly stressful. Even if you are trying to start in a very well established business segment with which you have extensive personal experience, the purely business and commercial concerns you have to manage can easily be overwhelming. Add in trying to invent something that hasn't been, it seems, attractive enough for anyone else to attempt (or, if attempted, succeed) adds a layer of stress that makes it seem like a potential nightmare.

If you can find a trusted partner (for the business) who has good business acumen, a sincere interest in your vision, and reasonable expectations on return, that could free you from the workload of "doing business" to focus on the innovation you will have to manage to make this work.

None of the foregoing was intended to say "you can't possibly do this", rather it is intended as a reminder to the part of your brain not currently enthralled with the very vague rationale of the four "why" points to assert itself and ensure that due diligence is not neglected.

This could be a good idea—but it is going to need a lot more detail where it currently doesn't have it. You need to make sure there are sources available, or figure out if you have some innovative idea for sourcing.

You need to make sure that you can actually recover the things you say you can, in sufficient quantities—and there is a market for those things that will bear the price you will have to charge to turn a profit.

You need to figure out whether you can actually employ the (currently) unemployable by carefully working out the capacities and skills they would need to contribute enough to the business's bottom line to be paid enough to make a living.

You need to decide what you find attractive about "being your own boss" and make sure the downsides are considered with a clear view of what they actually are—and then decide if that's still enough to make "being your own boss" a goal.

I hope you do a good analysis, it comes out favorably, and you ultimately succeed in this with only the minimal dose of the inevitable suffering owning and running a start-up business necessarily entails. The best of luck to you, and wishes for a stellar success at all four of your aspirational goals.

 

As others have suggested, this could likely be a financial loss. This is true for almost all commodities, not only electronics.

What needs to change is the mentality of both producers and consumers in order make reduce, reuse, and recycle the modus operandi.

In today’s financial framework, it is cheaper to throw away and buy new than to repair, reuse or recycle. Manufacturers know this and benefit financially by contributing to this mentality.

Edit: What needs to be introduced is take-back legislation. Every producer, manufacturer, distributor, supplier, retailer, store, must be compelled to take back any product sold to the consumer.

They have created the supply chain from the producer to the consumer. They only need to activate the reverse process.

 

As others have suggested, this could likely be a financial loss. This is true for almost all commodities, not only electronics.

What needs to change is the mentality of both producers and consumers in order make reduce, reuse, and recycle the modus operandi.

In today’s financial framework, it is cheaper to throw away and buy new than to repair, reuse or recycle. Manufacturers know this and benefit financially by contributing to this mentality.

The nascent right to repair movement, combined with the well established /OSS movement, have made simply "broken" devices like phones, tablets, and laptops much more valuable intact, or as working subsystems, than as components and materials.

Buying and repairing electronics that wold be classed as "waste" is something I find much more attractive as a startup—reuse, rather than recycle. One source for such things are returns to large retailers like Amazon which can easily end up in landfill if they are not immediately testing as "good" on return—and sometimes even if they are!

Companies like Liquidity Services, among others, are buying lots of high end returned items, repairing them, and then reselling them as refurbished. They also offer surplus sales, even on a B2C basis for ordinary consumers through their "Secondipity" online sales site, with some exceptional deals. Some of these companies have developed a generalized approach to testing, diagnosis, and repair that has lead to contracts as depot repair for manufacturers that previously were not repairing warranty returns, just replacing and disposing.

It's a really interesting new area. Returns run in the billions of dollars in the US alone!

 

My opinion is that you cannot make a financial success of such recovery, particularly in a first-world country like Oz. All such endeavours are carried out by slave-labour in the third world, where labour costs are minute and safety regulations are lax. The market for recovered second-hand electronic items as you describe is very small.

 

Perhaps a not-for-profit endeavour would be more likely. In any case, I believe the need for it is there, even if just to separate the equipment into recyclable materials. I am sure I saw a video about PCB recycling. There are machines which can shred PCBs and sort various metals.
There is a company which turns glass into 'sand' to use in roads and building materials. Unfortunately, pelletising plastic seems to only be done in India and a special export permit needs to be approved before sending plastic to be processed.

From what I can see there is growing concern about sending our e-waste to poorer countries for processing due to the lack of safety and poor conditions workers endure. One company I know is finding it too expensive to send e-waste overseas.
I am really liking the input. Great to get a reality check from outside of myself. Thank you.

 

I am calling BS on the option to not go ahead with recycling e-waste on the basis of profitability. Management of e-waste should be the responsibility of the manufacturer not dumped on the consumer. Consumers have a huge role to play but it ought to be easier to find a facility to take your stereo and other equipment once they break or become "old". My dream is that it becomes normal practice to take e-waste to a recycling facility rather than to the local tip.
In Australia we have a national television and computer recycling scheme but it ought to include all electronic equipment. Hence, businesses won't touch stereos etc because there is no money handouts from manufacturers. We can do better.

 

What needs to be introduced is take-back legislation. Every producer, manufacturer, distributor, supplier, retailer, store, must be compelled to take back any product sold to the consumer.

See, pretty impractical to me. My stepmother knits stocking caps and prayer shawls, so are you saying that twenty years from now, when someone snags a cap on a tree branch and rips it, my stepmother has to take it back? Does the store that sold her the yarn have to take that back? Does the store that takes back the yarn get to force the outlet they got it from to take it back? Does the sheep farmer eventually have to take it back? What about packaging? So when I buy an appliance I get to force the store that sold it to me to take back the packaging?

 

@WBahn. You are kidding, right? End-of-life disposal is something I am asked to plan for in a project even as a mere engineering student in 2023. I expect that professional engineers are supposed to have a plan for their products as well.

The new buzz word is circular economy. There is even a government office for that in Queensland. In the near future all e-waste is likely to be banned from becoming landfill in Australia. Solar panels are already banned in most Australian states which means either reuse or recycle.
There is a fair bit of difference between wool and rare earths going to landfill.

Sustainable engineering means having a plan for EOL of the project. Taking responsibility for what happens to that product once it has expired it's useful life. Someone has to recycle that product else we will have to keep mining raw material which has a negative impact on the earth.

Mineral resources on earth are finite. I am pretty sure wool is not in that category.

 

@WBahn. You are kidding, right? End-of-life disposal is something I am asked to plan for in a project even as a mere engineering student in 2023. I expect that professional engineers are supposed to have a plan for their products as well.

The new buzz word is circular economy. There is even a government office for that in Queensland. In the near future all e-waste is likely to be banned from becoming landfill in Australia. Solar panels are already banned in most Australian states which means either reuse or recycle.
There is a fair bit of difference between wool and rare earths going to landfill.

Sustainable engineering means having a plan for EOL of the project. Taking responsibility for what happens to that product once it has expired it's useful life. Someone has to recycle that product else we will have to keep mining raw material which has a negative impact on the earth.

Mineral resources on earth are finite. I am pretty sure wool is not in that category.

I'd just dissolve my manufacturing business after 20 years (if I hadn't been put out of business by those regulations anyway) and reincorperate as a different entity.

There are always ways around regulation for those clever enough. Beware of unintended consequences.

 

There is a fair bit of difference between wool and rare earths going to landfill.

So? I was responding to the assertion that, "Every producer, manufacturer, distributor, supplier, retailer, store, must be compelled to take back any product sold to the consumer."

That means that when you buy a car from a used car from a neighborhood car lot, that they must take it back from you after you run the wheels of (or wreck it). Who does the car lot get to force to take it back from them? What records have to be kept and maintained on every product to know who has to take it back? How big will the inevitable government bureaucracy end up that enforces all of this? Do you know exactly where you bought every item in your house so that you can force the right entity to take it back, even when they claim that they never sold that product? Even if we limit it to electronic items? I sure don't. I can't tell you where I bought half of the items sitting on the desk in front of me.

Are you going to have to take back all of the components that you sell as part of your recycling business? If not, why not?

 

See, pretty impractical to me. My stepmother knits stocking caps and prayer shawls, so are you saying that twenty years from now, when someone snags a cap on a tree branch and rips it, my stepmother has to take it back? Does the store that sold her the yarn have to take that back? Does the store that takes back the yarn get to force the outlet they got it from to take it back? Does the sheep farmer eventually have to take it back? What about packaging? So when I buy an appliance I get to force the store that sold it to me to take back the packaging?

The answer is YES. We just have to wrap our heads around this and come to accept that it is doable.
This is already happening on various commodities. It just need to be expanded where practical. The definitive word here is practical.

Right now, I can return the following to the store where I bought them:

inkjet printer cartridges
laser printer cartridges
batteries, all types
automotive lead-acid batteries
automotive components, e.g. starter motor, alternator
automotive tires
used engine oil
alcoholic beverage containers, cans and bottles

(just a few things off the top of my head)

 

Who said, 'Take back to the seller'? The desire is for the manufacturer to pay to have the product disposed of responsibly. It is the manufacturer who tells us we need their products and force us to upgrade because the new version is not compatible with the previous one. I had a perfectly good printer but ink cartridges for it are rare and not original brand. I was forced to buy a new one. My PC running XP would still be useful today if it weren't for constant upgrades to technology.
Why can't you buy VHS recorders anymore? Did you authorise the upgrade to Blu-ray? No you did not. Why then should you pay to have it recycled? However, recycling is expected as part of the EOL proposal made by the manufacturer or engineer. We need follow through on that proposal with money going towards recycling and that is what needs to change.

 

I am calling BS on the option to not go ahead with recycling e-waste on the basis of profitability

Hmmmm, you started this conversation as a discussion of the practicalities of economically recycling e-waste, and have now morphed it into a complaint about the economics of the present technological manufacturing processes.

I think the conclusion is clearly that recycling e-waste in its current is economically impractical, and the world would benefit from alternate design and manufacturing that corrected the problems that result, but frankly you are starting at the wrong end. The European mandates regarding common chargers for portable electronics illustrate a more effective action.

You can buy a VHS recorder if you really want one, and brand new at that. But you will have to have it manufactured without the benefit of mass production because the rest of the world has decided that they don't want one, and for good reason in my opinion. Same for your old, slow XP machine. If you want to run your 80 year old automobile because it has lots of residual milage you probably will struggle to find appropriate fuel on your journeys.

A lot of people run recycling centres and make a good living out of it, but not by making money from reclaimed waste, but rather by providing it as a public service and getting paid from taxes in one form or another, which is a way of bypassing the need to be economic.

 

Of course, economics is a big part of the equation, if not the most important part.
In order to reverse the supply chain, the cost of every product will have to increase. Who pays for the increased cost? The consumer, of course.

It is the consumer, you and I, that eventually pays for environmental protection, healthcare, abolition of slave-labor, and combating global warming. At the end of it all, money is a artifact of human organisation. Any quantity of money will never be able to reverse the global mess that we have created.

 

Selling bits and bobs to hobbyists and craft minded people is clearly just a side issue and not the main part of the business idea. I just thought it could be a potential line of business, competing with Chineese folks on ebay, and Mouser. Mouser sell CD spindle motors (or at least advertise) for A$5.50 each plus shipping. Scrap yards buy clean shiny copper for about A$6.50 per kilo. Stripping may be a pain so I might have to balance cost to strip wire with getting a lower price for shrouded copper wire. Aluminium or Aluminum as you US folks say, fetchs a decent price per kilo and there is plenty of it in electronics equipment.

The idea of reusing parts came from the trend to create JunkBots. They are robots made from salvaged parts using simple circuits. Not for commercial use but a hobbyist thing. I love pulling things apart. Hacker Spaces like to use salvaged parts and the folk who engage in those spaces feel good about the tiny impact the have on saving the planet. The niche is not huge but it is growing.

 

Who said, 'Take back to the seller'?

Did you not read the quote I was responding to, in which it said very pointedly that everyone at every level (including the 'store') must be compelled to take back any product that is provided to a consumer?

The desire is for the manufacturer to pay to have the product disposed of responsibly. It is the manufacturer who tells us we need their products and force us to upgrade because the new version is not compatible with the previous one. I had a perfectly good printer but ink cartridges for it are rare and not original brand. I was forced to buy a new one. My PC running XP would still be useful today if it weren't for constant upgrades to technology.
Why can't you buy VHS recorders anymore? Did you authorise the upgrade to Blu-ray? No you did not. Why then should you pay to have it recycled? However, recycling is expected as part of the EOL proposal made by the manufacturer or engineer. We need follow through on that proposal with money going towards recycling and that is what needs to change.

Why stop with VHS. There were technologies before that, such as various kinds of film.

And what about all those people that were forced to upgrade from their record players from the 78 rpm for shellac records to the lower 33 1/3 rpm for vinyl records? And that after they had had to upgrade from their wire recordings? Heck, people would still be happy with their panharmonicons if it weren't for those constant upgrades to technology.

If we must have personal computers, shouldn't everyone be happy with their Radio Shack TRS-80s and their cassette tape drives?

And how are you NOT going to pay to have it recycled? Do you really think that, somehow, no matter who is responsible for recycling it that that isn't going to get passed on to the consumer? The only way it isn't is if we just continue to borrow from our kids and future generations with yet more government debt.