A while ago, our council introduced the 4 bins system.
4) ??
transformers are expensive, hackerspace that stuff!
OK That was spooky .. Just saw the local news that our Waverley council has (Re-?) Introduced free Electronic waste drop-offs,
Including CRTs ... mebbe they're monitoring my posts ? or me
and they ban the lead from the solder for this insane reason to fill deliberately the landfills with electronics due to idiot managment and laws, how quickly could the new generation learn if those equipments would end up in their hands instead of the landfills, or to schools poorly equipped etc, universities should have give to the intrested students the equipments they no longer use instead of binning it
I literaly just registerd to chime in on this very topic.
I used to work for one of the big box office stores here in the US and their policy was we had to destroy any items the manufacture didn't want back and toss it into the dumpster. This would include most small electronics from digital cameras to mp3 players to routers, almost all office supplies that didn't sell or were opened/damaged, and even 24packs of water that had a bottle damaged or it expired. Now i'm not saying that destroying a $1000 projector that someone used once or a pack of 23 bottles of water can't be a little fun but totaly wastefull. Most of it of course went into the dumpster unharmed and retrived as quickly as possible by myself or another employee that was off at the time. I still use a Samsung all-in-one laser printer that was opened and never used. It was pretty funny when I went to fetch it too. The daily dumpster divers got there about two minutes before I did so I called the guy who just put it out to help me convince them it was junk. So he came out with a large trash bag full of paper and made a comment about what bad shape it was in and I offered them what I had in my wallet for it. Which if I remember correctly was $4. Not a bad deal for what was around $500 new. We would also bring all the office supplys to one of the local elementry schools, gotta help someone when you profit from whats technically trash. But to bring it full circle the other employee was questioned and caught for it and then got charged for theft. He ended up with just being fired but he was charged by the state a fine around $700 since it was still declared a crime. Not really too bad though since digital cameras and mp3 playes fetched a lot of money off ebay. But the next two people who had the same job got fired for doing the same thing.
I'm currently a Cisco VoIP engineer for a large IT company whos name I won't mention (caugh... it's two letters long) on a contract for another large corporation and it's pretty bad here too. The company I'm contracted too aquired another and when migrating parts of their VoIP network into the existing it left a lot of less than a year old servers free. So instead of shipping them to us where we'd use them in our lab they went to a shredder company for destruction. There was probably 20-30 of them in total, I'm not sure of their initial cost but still a lot of value just wasted. But the rules of the company I accually work for are very different. We can get almost anything shipped to us where it can accually get reused and not wasted. Then after a little while it sort of winds up in limbo and finds a great home in another lab outside the office. Best recycling ever and is great for getting certifications and trust me used Cisco gear still fetchs a high price on the used market so the less you buy the better. Once I'm done or decide to move on I can bring it all back and it's no longer collecting dust in my garage. Of course we also have a recycling program to pick up unused equipment but we fill out the list of what to send off so what doesn't make it is never missed. So sometimes the lack of efficiency in a large company can be great.
I think what I've learned is as long as your not greedy you might be able to score something for yourself. It's also why I like to bring random boxes in and out of the office, sometimes empty...
I used to recycle old autopilots to keep the rest of the fleet running. Take one cubic metre mostly mechanical box with nearly 1000 syncros, resolvers, adders, subtractors and other synchro goodies and use them as needed as spares. Those that were unusable for some reason ( no call for a sine/cosine adder) became a source of small bearings and coils mostly to keep fans running. What was not used went into a big hole where a bulldozer drove over it.
I literaly just registerd to chime in on this very topic.
I used to work for one of the big box office stores here in the US and their policy was we had to destroy any items the manufacture didn't want back and toss it into the dumpster. This would include most small electronics from digital cameras to mp3 players to routers, almost all office supplies that didn't sell or were opened/damaged, and even 24packs of water that had a bottle damaged or it expired. Now i'm not saying that destroying a $1000 projector that someone used once or a pack of 23 bottles of water can't be a little fun but totaly wastefull. Most of it of course went into the dumpster unharmed and retrived as quickly as possible by myself or another employee that was off at the time. I still use a Samsung all-in-one laser printer that was opened and never used. It was pretty funny when I went to fetch it too. The daily dumpster divers got there about two minutes before I did so I called the guy who just put it out to help me convince them it was junk. So he came out with a large trash bag full of paper and made a comment about what bad shape it was in and I offered them what I had in my wallet for it. Which if I remember correctly was $4. Not a bad deal for what was around $500 new. We would also bring all the office supplys to one of the local elementry schools, gotta help someone when you profit from whats technically trash. But to bring it full circle the other employee was questioned and caught for it and then got charged for theft. He ended up with just being fired but he was charged by the state a fine around $700 since it was still declared a crime. Not really too bad though since digital cameras and mp3 playes fetched a lot of money off ebay. But the next two people who had the same job got fired for doing the same thing.
I'm currently a Cisco VoIP engineer for a large IT company whos name I won't mention (caugh... it's two letters long) on a contract for another large corporation and it's pretty bad here too. The company I'm contracted too aquired another and when migrating parts of their VoIP network into the existing it left a lot of less than a year old servers free. So instead of shipping them to us where we'd use them in our lab they went to a shredder company for destruction. There was probably 20-30 of them in total, I'm not sure of their initial cost but still a lot of value just wasted. But the rules of the company I accually work for are very different. We can get almost anything shipped to us where it can accually get reused and not wasted. Then after a little while it sort of winds up in limbo and finds a great home in another lab outside the office. Best recycling ever and is great for getting certifications and trust me used Cisco gear still fetchs a high price on the used market so the less you buy the better. Once I'm done or decide to move on I can bring it all back and it's no longer collecting dust in my garage. Of course we also have a recycling program to pick up unused equipment but we fill out the list of what to send off so what doesn't make it is never missed. So sometimes the lack of efficiency in a large company can be great.
I think what I've learned is as long as your not greedy you might be able to score something for yourself. It's also why I like to bring random boxes in and out of the office, sometimes empty...
I ask all eevblog members for a moment of silence for all that poor test equipment.
Come on people, it's frigg'n dumpster diving!
Name one person, anywhere, who has a criminal record because of dumpster diving when they are not trespassing.