One day I entered in one of the labs in a previous company and found a few piles of "old" macbooks pro ready to trash. I would say easily around 500'
They seemed quite new to me so I asked if I could get a bunch and reuse parts to make a working one.
They told me I could get all I wanted. So I took 10. I arrived home and all of them were functional after formating and reinstalling. My family and friends got very happy with seminew laptops for free.
I guess is not only about recycling or shredding, is as well about giving a second, third or fourth life to our goods...
And lets be honest. Recycling is a very wasteful process. If we want to be eco friendly we should consume less, thats the only way.
Well apparently not all people want to be eco friendly.
Most people I know would rather buy a new low/mid range product than a used/refurbished device that was high end when it was released. It's mind boggling - you'd rather get a creaky piece of shit locked down cheap NEW laptop than a high quality business grade used one, because... it hasn't been used before?
I believe that if a device was gently used and hasn't failed, the chance of it failing after 1-2 years is actually lower than with a new one. I don't know if it's true, but it's been my experience.
But then again, my relationship with tools is weird - if I get them, I clean and rebuild them, so they're mine. No one else gets to use them. They're almost like pets. And I don't care how many people used them before me...
> It's mind boggling - you'd rather get a creaky piece of shit locked down cheap NEW laptop than a high quality business grade used one, because...
Yes but not only that, for laptops it comes down to priorities. I know plenty of people who are better served with Chromebook with 8 hour battery life than a refurb high end one with 2 h battery.
> I believe that if a device was gently used and hasn't failed, the chance of it failing after 1-2 years is actually lower than with a new one. I don't know if it's true, but it's been my experience.
True for some devices and not true for others.
> They're almost like pets. And I don't care how many people used them before me...
It's unhealthy to think about tools that way, off course rebuilding your tools increases their emotional value. If your rebuilds of tools are good, not very custom and things are not expensive, try to give them away to friends and family, it usually increases your satisfaction, lowers materialistic attachment and can make you more creative.
There is a reason "recycle" comes last in "reduce, reuse, recycle". But not consuming is bad for the economy, so the invisible hand does its best to prevent reduction and reuse.
> But not consuming is bad for the economy, so the invisible hand does its best to prevent reduction and reuse.
That 'the invisible hand' (by which I assume you mean the free market) prevents reuse is simply not true. In a competitive free market you would have companies that would specialise in reuse.
For Apple's products that is exactly what happens: there are actually quite a few companies selling refurbished second hand Apple products (e.g. [1] and [2]), including Apple itself [3]. Of course, regulation sometimes gets in the way: India's prime minister Modi is preventing Apple from selling second hand iPhones in India in an attempt to get them to start producing products in India.
The free market has many short-comings. Preventing reuse is not one of them.
"Not consuming" is actually great for the economy.
Imagine you could produce a car that never needed repairs and would last a million miles and cost the same to build as current cars. You'd free up tons of mechanics and auto-workers to build and repair other things. Actual economic output would go up, more and better things would be made.
The problem here is that for example in Poland the market is flooded with post-enterprise laptops from Germany/UK/France, and while yes, those laptops get second life in this market, almost all of them will end up in landfills, not recycled fully. So basically Germany "recycles" their IT equipment by selling it to other markets where it's not certain the equipment will be recycled once it dies fully.
Note this seems to be not about independent recyclers that Apple forced to shred their products. It's rather companies that Apple specifically hired to shred products that were returned to Apple, and Apple didn't want to refurbish.
While it's still a waste, it's not as outrageous as I first thought.
Indeed - 13 years ago, I had a side-line buying junk PowerBooks on eBay for very little ($100-$200), cobbling them together into perfectly working machines, and then selling them on for $1000+. I only ever tied up ~$2000 at a time, and would sell working parts I had no use for on, and even broken parts, as someone will want it, even if not for much. Never did any deep repairs, just part swapping and replacement.
As an added bonus I always had a snazzy laptop, as I'd sometimes hang on to a high spec machine for a few months before selling it on.
From what I can see on eBay today, it's still an eminently viable cottage industry.
People are acting like they're shredding last year's iPhone models. Apple products have great resell value and they're passed on as hand-me-downs often. If something got back to Apple, chances are reusing parts is not plausible. Not much you can harvest from an iPhone 3G other than the raw materials.
Some would strongly disagree that these phones don't have use. One great example is this: https://rfcx.org/
These phones are only cheap because the consumer market is giving them away (high supply). That makes them very good for specific applications and given the presense of complex sensors, battery backup, and small form factor you have a very attractive package for potentially important use cases. That's also just setting asside the idea that someone might want to use these pieces. Some third world countries may benifit from a huge influx of cheap technology every year.
Very cool link. I'm going to see if they are working in Guatemala, or if there's something similar being done there. Illegal land invasions in the national parks are a huge problem, but it's less of a detection issue and more of an enforcement/corruption issue.
I'd always assumed that iPhones would have a high resale value too, but I find that they are surprisingly cheap. You can pick up iPhone 4S phones for £50 [0].
Then compare iPhone 5S (£120) [1] vs Samsung Galaxy S5 (£130 - 140) [2].
I really don't understand why. Perhaps there's just more people that want to buy second hand android phones.
They used to - today, I think only MacBooks retain that famous resale-ability.
Probably because the iPhones are specced just enough to last a couple of years, whereas Android phones are over-specced as hell, even the Galaxy S4 had 4 cores and 2GB of RAM, which is still more than useable today...
That doesn't seem likely. The most common failure points for iPhones are cracked screens, worn out batteries and broken home buttons, all of which Apple can repair. If it's something stronger like water damage, the electronics can't be relied on to be reused.
It may sound odd, but this is standard practice in most "recycling" environments. When you recycle an aluminium can it doesn't get refilled. It gets melted into new aluminium. Even if the can is perfectly good and could be sanitized, to ensure constant quality it is best to start anew from the fundamental ingredients. Seeing a macbook shredded looks horrible, but if those bits are being properly recycled into new components then I can see apple's point. Rebuilding from the ground up is probably much easier than picking and testing every little component to ensure quality.
If you own a car, it has steel parts. Some of that steel is recycled metal from old cars. We consider it new. But would you be willing to pay the same price for a car with a chassis harvested from an older car? What level of testing would be needed for you to pay the same price as the car with a chassis built anew? If that testing costs more than a couple hundred, the logical thing is to melt.
Old cars are often used to source parts for the repair of other cars. It's common practice, which has persisted without any major problems.
Likewise, 3rd-party repair shops will often harvest parts from old phones, to replace parts in phones they are repairing. Picking and testing components doesn't appear to be a problem for them. Their customers seem to have no issue with recycled parts being used to repair their phones.
If there is demand for recycled parts, and they can be reused while still ensuring quality, what is the problem?
But electronics is not just a single material. It consists of independent parts which could work fine as replacements without shredding the entire device.
A majority of comments here seem to think that literally millions of units of electronics are being shredded wastefully, instead of more meaningfully re-used. Ok, great! This is HN! Where are the calls to start a company to leverage this near-infinite supply of valuable trash through economically productive re-use? Should be very profitable, right?
Another distinct possibility is that the proportion of valuable items in this stream is too small to warrant their recovery. There are already tons of people that refurb and sell computers. It's a small market, and increasing the supply by 100x (or whatever the multiple of "wasted" recycling opportunities is) would likely distort that market into total collapse.
I take it you're being facetious. The referenced article discusses some of the contractual language that Apple uses to hinder re-use, and they aren't the only ones. The real risk of course are unscrupulous vendors who sell as 'new' things they have recovered either on Ebay or Amazon which turns around and bites the original manufacturer because the customer complains their parts are bad.
Having dealt with many of the major recycling centers in the bay area, and the resellers, and the various people in between, the maze of laws and contracts make unwinding this nearly impractical in most cases. It is pretty amazing when someone is willing to sneak a $250,000 mini-computer to you out the back of the building because the corporate "requirements" are that a perfectly serviced and operating machine be sent to shredding rather than do anything else.
Of course you really can't make a business off their largess but a number of important computer systems were saved in similar ways.
Generally there is often more value to the manufacturer that they not be recycled and so we end up with these sorts of contracts.
> A majority of comments here seem to think that literally millions of units of electronics are being shredded wastefully, instead of more meaningfully re-used. Ok, great! This is HN! Where are the calls to start a company to leverage this near-infinite supply of valuable trash through economically productive re-use? Should be very profitable, right?
There are already companies doing it. TFA talks about iThings collected by Apple themselves whose recycling Apple outsourced to others under the condition that everything will be teared down to raw materials.
"Electronics recyclers are filled with heaps of broken iMacs and MacBooks, which due to economics and the requirements of certifications are most often scrapped rather than repaired or sold," John Bumstead, a refurbisher who sells MacBooks that he salvages and frankensteins together from broken ones that he gets from recyclers that don't work with Apple, told me.
In trying to source MacBooks to repair, Bumstead says he's been turned away countless times by recyclers who say they can't sell him Apple products.
So yeah, the question is not whether recycling itself is profitable or not. The problem is that Apple apparently has sufficient profit margins that to them recycling is less profitable than shredding the old iGadgets to raw materials and reforging them into the latest shiny. Especially if it's done in China where the resulting pollution doesn't affect them as much.
There is an entire industry out there for re-using and repairing these electronics. The unfortunate part is that the great Apple steamroller, and many other large companies, are fighting against the right-to-repair bill. I can only imagine there are other industries which use these devices in other countries, much like the Save the Rainforest link that someone else posted on this comment thread.
Much like our previous election, people aren't showing up to voice their concerns of not having the right-to-repair their electronics. This doesn't just affect iPhone users either.. this includes farmers. Having grown up on a farm, being able to fix your own equipment is absolutely essential - no debate possible.
I kid you not, one of the arguments against the right-to-repair is that you could repair your microwave and it might blow up and harm you. What a load of bull.
If you, or anyone else, is interested I highly suggest watching this video of an owner of a repair shop in New York. This guy has travelled to defend our right-to-repair, but the problem is not enough people are fighting back.
It can be profitable. But yeah, the market is small. I've looked into this before - even the poorer Eastern European countries prefer new products to refurbished ones. And that seems to mirror the opinion of a lot (probably most) people.
Will repair MacBooks for food, but for the love of god don't shred them. Just give them out at high schools or college grads. They can learn a thing or two & save BUX in the process.
There are also a number of charitable organizations trying to bring computation into underserved international communities (eg. http://www.reneal.org/). Please consider donating used hardware; it can have a tremendous impact on communities whose schools have (at best!) a single computer for hundreds of students.
Readit News
They told me I could get all I wanted. So I took 10. I arrived home and all of them were functional after formating and reinstalling. My family and friends got very happy with seminew laptops for free.
I guess is not only about recycling or shredding, is as well about giving a second, third or fourth life to our goods... And lets be honest. Recycling is a very wasteful process. If we want to be eco friendly we should consume less, thats the only way.
Most people I know would rather buy a new low/mid range product than a used/refurbished device that was high end when it was released. It's mind boggling - you'd rather get a creaky piece of shit locked down cheap NEW laptop than a high quality business grade used one, because... it hasn't been used before?
I believe that if a device was gently used and hasn't failed, the chance of it failing after 1-2 years is actually lower than with a new one. I don't know if it's true, but it's been my experience.
But then again, my relationship with tools is weird - if I get them, I clean and rebuild them, so they're mine. No one else gets to use them. They're almost like pets. And I don't care how many people used them before me...
Yes but not only that, for laptops it comes down to priorities. I know plenty of people who are better served with Chromebook with 8 hour battery life than a refurb high end one with 2 h battery.
> I believe that if a device was gently used and hasn't failed, the chance of it failing after 1-2 years is actually lower than with a new one. I don't know if it's true, but it's been my experience.
True for some devices and not true for others.
> They're almost like pets. And I don't care how many people used them before me...
It's unhealthy to think about tools that way, off course rebuilding your tools increases their emotional value. If your rebuilds of tools are good, not very custom and things are not expensive, try to give them away to friends and family, it usually increases your satisfaction, lowers materialistic attachment and can make you more creative.
That 'the invisible hand' (by which I assume you mean the free market) prevents reuse is simply not true. In a competitive free market you would have companies that would specialise in reuse. For Apple's products that is exactly what happens: there are actually quite a few companies selling refurbished second hand Apple products (e.g. [1] and [2]), including Apple itself [3]. Of course, regulation sometimes gets in the way: India's prime minister Modi is preventing Apple from selling second hand iPhones in India in an attempt to get them to start producing products in India.
The free market has many short-comings. Preventing reuse is not one of them.
[1] https://leapp.be/nl
[2] https://www.forza-refurbished.be/?gclid=CNb63IaEutMCFSEG0wod...
[3] https://www.apple.com/shop/browse/home/specialdeals/mac
[4] http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/hardware/tim-cook-k...
Imagine you could produce a car that never needed repairs and would last a million miles and cost the same to build as current cars. You'd free up tons of mechanics and auto-workers to build and repair other things. Actual economic output would go up, more and better things would be made.
While it's still a waste, it's not as outrageous as I first thought.
I was able to part-out my old Macbook air (with broken battery and power adapter) and put toward the proceeds and ~US$200 toward the latest's model:
Apple just has that tight control over its parts pre- and post- use.
As an added bonus I always had a snazzy laptop, as I'd sometimes hang on to a high spec machine for a few months before selling it on.
From what I can see on eBay today, it's still an eminently viable cottage industry.
This makes sense, given data is almost certainly bound to be present on phones etc.
Maybe there's a more nuanced way to do this, but this doesn't seem all that bad.
OTOH, having these phones go through a refurb program and selling them probably involves a fair amount or resource use as well.
My "Hacker" "News" moment of the day.
Also, it's not up to you, the costumer decided to deliver the device for recycling and not for scrap.
The resources used to refurb and resell are a tiny fraction of those required to go from raw material (recycled or mined) to a new phone.
As far as data goes, soft tools will stop anyone but the NSA. If you're worried about the NSA you don't toss your phone in a collection box.
Yes, you are missing something.
Like removing the flash storage first, maybe...?
Deleted Comment
These phones are only cheap because the consumer market is giving them away (high supply). That makes them very good for specific applications and given the presense of complex sensors, battery backup, and small form factor you have a very attractive package for potentially important use cases. That's also just setting asside the idea that someone might want to use these pieces. Some third world countries may benifit from a huge influx of cheap technology every year.
Then compare iPhone 5S (£120) [1] vs Samsung Galaxy S5 (£130 - 140) [2].
I really don't understand why. Perhaps there's just more people that want to buy second hand android phones.
[0]: http://second-handphones.com/all-handsets.html?manufacturer=...
[1]: http://second-handphones.com/all-handsets.html?manufacturer=...
[2]: http://second-handphones.com/all-handsets.html?manufacturer=...
Probably because the iPhones are specced just enough to last a couple of years, whereas Android phones are over-specced as hell, even the Galaxy S4 had 4 cores and 2GB of RAM, which is still more than useable today...
The Galaxy S5 was released half a year after the iPhone 5S, which might explain the price difference.
If you own a car, it has steel parts. Some of that steel is recycled metal from old cars. We consider it new. But would you be willing to pay the same price for a car with a chassis harvested from an older car? What level of testing would be needed for you to pay the same price as the car with a chassis built anew? If that testing costs more than a couple hundred, the logical thing is to melt.
Likewise, 3rd-party repair shops will often harvest parts from old phones, to replace parts in phones they are repairing. Picking and testing components doesn't appear to be a problem for them. Their customers seem to have no issue with recycled parts being used to repair their phones.
If there is demand for recycled parts, and they can be reused while still ensuring quality, what is the problem?
Another distinct possibility is that the proportion of valuable items in this stream is too small to warrant their recovery. There are already tons of people that refurb and sell computers. It's a small market, and increasing the supply by 100x (or whatever the multiple of "wasted" recycling opportunities is) would likely distort that market into total collapse.
Having dealt with many of the major recycling centers in the bay area, and the resellers, and the various people in between, the maze of laws and contracts make unwinding this nearly impractical in most cases. It is pretty amazing when someone is willing to sneak a $250,000 mini-computer to you out the back of the building because the corporate "requirements" are that a perfectly serviced and operating machine be sent to shredding rather than do anything else.
Of course you really can't make a business off their largess but a number of important computer systems were saved in similar ways.
Generally there is often more value to the manufacturer that they not be recycled and so we end up with these sorts of contracts.
There are already companies doing it. TFA talks about iThings collected by Apple themselves whose recycling Apple outsourced to others under the condition that everything will be teared down to raw materials.
Have a look here for some real recycling action: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14100989
edit:
Hell, it's right there in TFA:
"Electronics recyclers are filled with heaps of broken iMacs and MacBooks, which due to economics and the requirements of certifications are most often scrapped rather than repaired or sold," John Bumstead, a refurbisher who sells MacBooks that he salvages and frankensteins together from broken ones that he gets from recyclers that don't work with Apple, told me.
In trying to source MacBooks to repair, Bumstead says he's been turned away countless times by recyclers who say they can't sell him Apple products.
So yeah, the question is not whether recycling itself is profitable or not. The problem is that Apple apparently has sufficient profit margins that to them recycling is less profitable than shredding the old iGadgets to raw materials and reforging them into the latest shiny. Especially if it's done in China where the resulting pollution doesn't affect them as much.
Much like our previous election, people aren't showing up to voice their concerns of not having the right-to-repair their electronics. This doesn't just affect iPhone users either.. this includes farmers. Having grown up on a farm, being able to fix your own equipment is absolutely essential - no debate possible.
I kid you not, one of the arguments against the right-to-repair is that you could repair your microwave and it might blow up and harm you. What a load of bull.
If you, or anyone else, is interested I highly suggest watching this video of an owner of a repair shop in New York. This guy has travelled to defend our right-to-repair, but the problem is not enough people are fighting back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F66BapDvpU8https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/industry-and-app...
Dead Comment