I have no idea why someone would do this. Big thank you to whoever dumped a perfectly working Brother laser printer! 🫶

I needed a laser printer like nothing else.. but resisted buying and kept using print shops; basically kicking the can down the street. Glad I didn’t buy one because a Brother laser printer was sitting in a dumpster insecurely nearly teetering on an unstable pile of broken furniture. I assumed something would be wrong with it, but figured it’d be worthwhile to try to fix it.

Well it turns out it simply works. Drum is good - not even a scratch. Still has toner. Was mostly full of paper, in fact. It’s hard to see why someone would toss it like that. The only defect was a missing plastic panel with the button labels on it - nothing important. Brother is good brand because it’s platform neutral (respects FOSS platforms) and they have a working non-enshitified website. And no shenanigans. Unlike Canon IIRC, who packs their PDF user guides inside a Windows EXE. Brother is also the lesser of evils when it comes to ink/toner swindles.

I’m grateful I found it, which only occurred because the dumpster happened to be en route from a print shop. It’s all incidental. Had no one spotted it that day it would have taken a tumble when the truck tips the load 45°, and that would have destroyed it. That would have been a shameful waste. No idea if recupel is even in the loop when someone rents a huge skip and fills it with anything arbitrarily.

If someone has /working/ electronics to dump, isn’t there a hotline they can call? Surely it would be worth it for a charity like Oxfam come by and pick up anything that works.

¹ title disambiguation: Brother the printer brand not the relative.