Does e-waste have any vintage audio in it?

[birddog]

Maybe we can get 2325fan to chime in here.... He makes his living working for an electronics recycling company, I bet he has some stories to tell about stuff that gets destroyed.

Of course, since he is now into vintage audio, I bet some of the stuff never makes it back to the facility!

 

[jhal]

You mean, formatting it, then physically putting it into a powerful shredder, grinding it into powder, putting it into a concrete mix and make a wall out of it?

A drill through the platter area of the drive works very well.

I have recovered stuff off of a drive that I formatted before with a data recovery program so it's not that hard to do.

There are programs you can buy if you don't want to physically destroy the drive (so someone else can benefit from a complete computer).
I have this one and I tried to recover some data after running it and it was too garbled to be of any use.

http://www.killdisk.com/

 

[Glen B]

Exactly! This is exactly what I see to any eco-nuts who turn their noses up at taking "rubbish" from the heap whilst busy sorting their paper and plastic.

The dump near me doesn't allow picking through stuff either...I see speakers, receivers, all sorts of vintage stuff all lying there. You can't take it though, and they've threatened to call the police. I've scored a couple of things when I see it in the back of someone's car and ask politely - they're normally happy to let me have it. The dump trolls have a strong dislike for this for some reason though.

Have you considered offering a little beer money in exchange for being allowed to pick out vintage pieces ?

 

[MunkeyQ]

Have you considered offering a little beer money in exchange for being allowed to pick out vintage pieces ?

I've tried that, and it was still a firm no. That's what got them to threaten to call the police.

 

[toxcrusadr]

There *is* Vintage Audio In E-scrap

Update on this topic. I visited our local e-scrap recycler. In short, the news is very good.

He puts aside vintage and potentially reusable stuff and has a shelf with everything from overhead projectors to some kind of Pioneer laser tape player thing (looked like vintage data storage). Said he sometimes gets a receiver or two and recently sold a 10" RTR for $5. And they get speakers, which they junk. Big heavy ones. I told him about pulling the drivers. But the most exciting thing (out of many) was when I looked in one of the big cardboard pallet sized bins and saw tubes. Turned out to be several modules of Farnsworth transmitting & receiving gear - pic attached. We pulled em out and I explained about tube gear. There's a lone 6V6 in there, but what is missing from this pic is the fourth, empty chassis that was the Power Supply - with 3 huge empty transformer spaces on it. :tears: He did not know the transformers were anything special and was throwing them into the transformer pile which sells for 24 cents/lb as scrap. He proceeded to pull the big honking transformer in the middle of the pic from the bin, said it was from that unit and handed it to me. All this stuff was free.

Long story short, he's going to put aside anything with tubes or speakers, and he's already saving other gear. I told him I'd make it worth his while, maybe pay him higher than scrap value or something. I told him neither of us was likely to get rich off it, but together we might save some cool obsolete gear from the shredder and I could share it with my 40,000 audio pals. :thmbsp: I'm going to email him a guide sheet of what to look for with pics.

I suggest you try this approach. Understand that this guy is not your normal junkyard dog. He's very concientous and recycles every scrap he takes in. No waste. He understands that reuse comes before recycle. He's a nice guy. He flat out told me that there are some real jerks out there, bad people, but he's not in it to get rich, but to do the right thing. So YMMV.

BTW the numbers on this transformer are C305775 30913 if anyone can identify it.

I'd say it was a good day. :thmbsp:

 

[gogofast]

my brother's friend used to run a computer recycling business about 10-15 years ago. he told me that among truck-full of computer hardwares, there used to be tons of receivers, r2r's, and even tubed stuffs. of course, they just crushed them for scrap metal.

 

[toxcrusadr]

Something has to be done, and it's up to us, folks. Beyond just the horror of gear being destroyed, it's just wrong to throw away usable or fixable things. I'm as green as they come, and this is not proper recycling.

 

[caddisgeek]

Get to know, your local dump dude! It pays dividends

On a another note, a friend of mine is waste manager for the local council, I could have a casual job at the local recycling centre. Imagine that, getting paid $25 bucks an hour to hunt for free vintage

 

[jonman]

I contacted the local recycle place here about home electronics items and was told the could not give them out because of potential liability problems. I did get to take home 200 new, blank 90 minute cassette tapes, they had advertised on Freecycle though.

 

[jimmy666]

if the police come what do they charge you with as this stuff has no value so is it still classified as theft under 5000 or what. I'm sure this would be easy to fight in court if anything ever did happen.

 

[theprofessor]

I can attest to seeing loads of vintage gear being sent to the crusher. A couple years ago at my old school, I spotted the STR-7065 in my signature on top of the heap. I asked them if I could give them a few dollars for it, and they said no, it was to be recycled. I told my buddy that, and he said "I'll get it for you if you trade me your boombox for it." At the time, I had a pretty rad eighties boombox which I found on the curb, so I figured "what the hell?" if he could get me this receiver, I could let the boombox go. Twenty minutes later he comes back with the receiver in hand. "Oh, I just acted like I was one of the helpers. I just told them that I was gonna put it on a cart outside."


Other than a few drifting caps, and some light static, there was absolutely nothing wrong with this receiver. Cosmetically it looks new, not a single blemish.

Sometime last year, I believe I made a post about it, they had a Marantz Model 140 sitting on top of the heap. I'm still pretty bummed that I was unable to rescue that one, but I know for a fact there was more to be had. At these particular collections I've seen stuff from Sony ES gear to Sansui Reverb units.

 

[toxcrusadr]

Oh, the pain, the pain. I feel like a vegetarian in a slaughterhouse.

 

[soundmotor]

Well that's just plain ****ing stupid, but it doesn't surprise me one bit. This "green" madness generates more waste then it prevents IMO. What ever happened to reusing old things intact? That's recycling at it's highest point. Absolutely no waste, and someone is proud to own and cherish whatever the item is.

:thmbsp:

For towns that have transfer stations i.e. dumps, they pay a tipping fee based on the weight of the skip they send out for recycling. The less they send the less it costs the town. In the budget squeaker environment most towns operate in, it adds up over time. Our town lets its skip sit a long while before it goes out and any resident can grab anything before it goes in. The DPW guys that work there have the enlightened attitude that it is less work for them if stuff is hauled away beforehand.

Now for an example of stupidity. A friend's son is working on his Scout Eagle project and wanted to add a "swap shack" at their dump. It would have a solar panel for the lights and vent fans plus be built from "green" materials. The whole intention is to provide a short term resting place for items too good to throw away so that others could get them before they get trashed. This town has a staging area where all electronics, furniture, metal, etc. goes rather than in the general trash area and people drive into this area and leave stuff on the ground. You can only drop off, not pick up so if you are leaving your still working blender and see an electric chainsaw you can use there, forget it. Everything goes in the skip and a DPW guy sits there all day to make sure no one breaks the rules. The bottom line is that the town won't approve the swap shack because it will create "too much work" for the DPW. The Scout has been through the entire logic line above in front of the selectmen but no go. What a great example of typical town BS and stupidity. This by the way is an "enlightened, PC suburb of Boston town.....ahem.

You have the right idea though. If you can delay something going to the landfill and fill your need it is the ultimate in recycling and reuse.

 

[MAXZ28]

I think that the whole reusable mentality diminishes with the size of the city. The bigger the town, the less value in reusing verses recycling. There will always be exceptions, of course, but in my experience, smaller towns don't have alot of resources and tend to appreciate something being reused verses thrown out.

I scored my first freebies at an appliance store recycling pile in Wisconsin over the holiday weekend and the appliance store folks were more than happy to allow me to dig through their mountain of TV's. I highly doubt if my local Best Buy would allow me to even walk around their BOH [ Back Of House } area let alone scrounge through the gear people are bringing in for recycling.

http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/showthread.php?t=172727

There are bigger recycling centers cashing in on the electronics resales on Ebay. Asset Recovery Systems sells alot of gear out of St. Paul [ no affiliation, folks ]. In fact, I purchased a pallet load of 12 receivers last year and every single one of them worked. Granted, they weren't all pristine and blemish free, but it goes to show that alot of what ends up discarded isn't thrown out because it's broken, but because people have replaced them or believe they no longer have value and decide they are obsolete.

 

[Arkay]

We don't have quite the same system here in Hong Kong, but similar in some respects. The stuff that doesn't get bought fairly quickly from the used-audio places where I "hunt" eventually gets sent across the border in bulk for tearing apart and crushing. Most of that has been well picked-over by various dealers and buyers before, though, so it would be difficult for good stuff to be "wasted" from there.

I've got a few decent things --like a higher-end vintage Denon Laserdisk player that they gave me free, because it had about a dollar scrap-metal recycling value. I cleaned out some grease that was clogged with cockroach droppings puke: ) and it re-lubed it, and it works perfectly.

Yesterday a guy tried to give me a (reproduction, not genuine antique) cathedral-style radio, for free, because otherwise it was going to be crushed. I couldn't take it, but I made arrangements for it to be saved for later pick-up.

The cool thing is that anything REALLY NICE, like an SX-1980 will NOT be sent from there for recycling. It will end up in the hands of an audio buyer, whether an audiophile collector in the Mainland, or someone in Pakistan, or someone like me. Only some boring-looking and obscure European or American brand stuff that people wouldn't know MIGHT be from time to time get tragically trashed, but not much, not likely and not often. Too many people in the market know their gear too well to let much get past them.

On the other hand, there is simultaneously some stuff getting taken every day to the scrap-metal collection places, instead of to the audio market. Some of that still gets picked up and taken to the audio market, so MOST of the decent audio gear ends up in the audio market, but SOME does not. Some of it still gets tossed in with the scrap metal and hauled away for crushing, because the guys at the scrap-recycling places generally know next-to-nothing about audio, and can't be bothered to separate stuff out unnless they think someone will come by and pay them more for it. Still, it won't sit and wait more than a day or two.

Fortunately, there are people like me --and a few poorer types who look for stuff they can resell in the audio market for a quick profit-- who swing through and look sometimes, so most decent stuff gets rescued from there.

So LOTS of junk gets recycled, and A LITTLE good stuff probably does, too. Still, the system is pretty efficient and effective, and not much good stuff would slip through the cracks here.

...especially not if I see it, first!

 

[toxcrusadr]

Well that's just plain ****ing stupid, but it doesn't surprise me one bit. This "green" madness generates more waste then it prevents IMO. What ever happened to reusing old things intact? That's recycling at it's highest point. Absolutely no waste, and someone is proud to own and cherish whatever the item is.

I've been thinking about this post. It's not the 'green madness' that's causing this. A few years ago there was virtually no e-scrap recycling going on. *everything went into the landfill.* So for the 99% of the stuff that really is junk and not good vintage stuff, it's a step up to shred and recycle it.

The madness we're discussing here is the fading away of the 'reuse' area at the local landfill or transfer station, and the refusal of some escrap collectors to allow cherry picking. These problems are due to fears of liability, greed, or simple lack of creativity and goodwill. NOT by 'green madness.'

I still have hope that if enough people make noise about this, we can make some changes. That requires attitude adjustment, which must take place one person at a time.

 

[soundmotor]

I think that the whole reusable mentality diminishes with the size of the city. The bigger the town, the less value in reusing verses recycling. There will always be exceptions, of course, but in my experience, smaller towns don't have alot of resources and tend to appreciate something being reused verses thrown out.

Nope, stupid is stupid regardless of town size.

It all comes down to one person saying yea or nay.

In this case the head of the DPW for that town.

 

[toxcrusadr]

In my experience many solid waste guys do business like they are still in the 50s and 60s. They don't change very fast.

 

[MAXZ28]

Yeah, I just can't deal with folks who have the "If I can't benefit from it, why should you?" attitude.

 

[pahtcenter77]

if the police come what do they charge you with as this stuff has no value so is it still classified as theft under 5000 or what. I'm sure this would be easy to fight in court if anything ever did happen.

If they can (or want to) prove that you came there with the intent to take something, you can then be charged with burglary, regardless of the value. Pre-meditation is the killer there. Probably isn't worth the effort, though.