The Brussels-wide waste management system blocks repairers from access to wasted material at every step. Recupel collects the e-waste and appliance waste. The moment it is in their hands, the public is forbidden access. They also collect it haphazardly. Fragile electronics get tossed in a box without protection and under the crushing weight of other waste. So there is a good chance of destruction in the transport of it before it’s even looked at. Then various charities go through it and guess whether stuff works. Sometimes they test it and sometimes they don’t even bother. The bulk of it gets broken down, materials separated and melted down. The charities have an opportunity to repair stuff for the 2nd hand market, but I think they only consider the most trivial of low-effort repairs.

It seems to be an opaque process. No one in the chain of custody knows anything about the rest of the chain. There is never a stage where the public gets access to the waste. I need many parts that parts dealers cannot get from their suppliers. It’s a shitshow. The parts I need are usually unavailable. And when they are available, it’s bundled in a costly monolithic blob of components that exceeds the value of the thing. So I go to the “junkyards”, where they kick me out as soon as the realise I’m not dumping but looking to harvest. Because they will be damned if they lose a fraction of a penny melt value of whatever I take to prolong the life of something else. They also pile shit so high as to make dumpster diving dangerous, which then serves as good sounding rationale to block repairers from access.

And sadly, it’s probably the best process in the world because the rest of world doesn’t even bother separating hazardous materials out. They just dump e-waste into landfills while the EPA looks the other way (in the US case).

In any case, I must say I’m grateful for those who do not follow the proper dumping procedure because it gives repairers a feasible chance at harvesting parts, or repairing the thing that’s dumped.

thanks:

I want to thank whoever tossed ½ of a laptop on the curb recently. I got a working SSD and a stick of DDR3 memory out of it.

And to whoever dumped the perfectly working air frier: thanks! Looked clean and new, like it was only used once.

Thanks as well to whoever dumped the broken ice maker. I might be able to fix it.

Whover dumped the LCD screens-- thanks! I use one of them daily.