About a week ago I go to a call where the lady had a tractor trailer full, and a couple of out buildings full, of e-waste. Most of it came from a local hospital and somehow it got donated to her "non-profit" organization so she could try to resell it to raise money. It wasn't the greatest looking load, mostly CRT monitors, printers, and keyboards. There must have been 500+ keyboards. I mentioned that whoever donated this material to her wasn't doing her any favors but rather dumping material that they no longer wanted to deal with.
Anyway, the lady wanted $500 for all of it, and I did not want to spend that much, nor did I want to deal with monitors and printers for two weeks. So, instead I cherry picked over her load, grabbing an item here and an item there. I mainly used my, "it's crap, crap, and megacrap..." closing technique. You know how it goes, "this one is broken, how about $1...This looks complete, I'll give you $5 for it...etc..."
So, I nab a few towers, a few servers, some UPS battery backups, a couple of boxes full of cords and cables, an eMac, and a couple of printers, among other things. In all I spent $100 and couldn't fit anything else in my truck. The load was paid for with the recycle value of the cables and battery backups, man those things were heavy. Most of the weight in those things is batteries and transformers and some of them are industrial grade. One of them weighs 120 lbs or so. After recovering my investment by scrapping most of the cables and battery backups, I began digging into the towers and servers.
I like to research model numbers and stuff like that before tearing anything apart, because we all know getting paid more money to NOT break stuff down is always the most ideal outcome. For those reading this far, I offer this tip. I use Terapeak for my market valuation research. It costs $25/month for the service, but I've been happily paying that fee for almost 2 years. If you are not familiar with Terapeak, it is a service that allows you to search eBay's completed listings for the past 12-months. It also offers other valuable data like average selling price, average sell through rates, etc. It really helps me put prices on items that I find and it pays for itself easily. This concludes the Terapeak commercial portion of this post, and we now return to our regularly scheduled programming.
The market research leads me to list a couple of items on eBay. Some of the items do not have bids yet, but there are still a few days left in the listings. If they don't sell, I'll break them down and take the scrap to the yard. The point of this posting is that two of the listings do have bids. I listed two HP Workstation servers for "parts only, not working" and clearly described the missing power buttons and other obvious defects. One of the listings has a current high bidder at $400 and the other one is at $202.50, and they still have a couple of days to go. I paid $5 for each of them when I was collecting the load. I'd say that's definitely better than "crap, crap, and megacrap" value.
