So, my girlfriends father died in 2018, he had a sort of computer business. His widow, her mother is attempting to clean out all the computers. There’s too much stuff for me to ebay, I’m taking 3 trash bags full of now outdated random parts(sata 2 cables, random mice, usb & wireless keyboards, cables galore) about 15 battery backups, printers, 2 plotters, and around 20 computers(a few all in ones, some small form factor, tower and workstation machines, 1 gaming pc from the 4770k era and 1 gaming pc from slightly after), and 2 older 2 bay NAS drives that aren’t worth nearly anything(backup to my backup?)
Many items are still NIB, such as 1.5 TB external drives, which I thinking of building an unraid box for, but that only accounts for a small portion of what I have available.
He also saved almost all the boxes, either in closets or in his basement.
I’d prefer not to continue to hoard the items as he did, yes he had a business so perhaps it’s not hoarding.
I already ebay to a degree, but how do I move this quantity of items? I’m not close to a major city, and gone are the days of the Trenton Computer Fair where someone could get rid of old pc’s by the truck load.
Look into Ebay local pickups, Craigslist, FB Marketplace, Nextdoor. If you aren’t able to move things fast enough and you just need to get rid of it, check for any e-waste facilities or non-profits for donation.
Some thrift stores are happy with that sort of stuff - I’ve seen a lot of variation as to what they can cope with (from USB cables up to enterprise type MFP printers! Depending where you are, a garage sale perhaps?
These kind of bulk lots can be extremely useful to someone just starting out, if OP weren’t 2000mi away I would offer a lump sum for everything.
I agree, put up a feeler post on FB marketplace and Craigslist with a could of pictures that generally represent what you have and look for someone to take everything. You’ll have to leave a lot of “meat on the bone”, but consider it the trade off for not having to deal with it individually.
However, I will say that while a recycler is definitely better than a landfill, the end result is that (probably mostly) everything is destroyed either way. You should always try to reduce, reuse and rehome first, but at the end of the day your personal well-being does factor in as well.
If you weren’t 2000 miles away, you could have whatever you want. I’d prefer not to send it to a recycler. I’m guessing I’ll slowly process it, remove and wipe the hard drives, clean up everything and slowly post it up.
I’ve got the time to do it, I’m the house husband, currently converting the basement from a bar into a craft area, redoing the lights, adding more electric, dedicated circuits, etc. I just need to fit cleaning, sorting, wiping hard drives into everything else.
If you need any cables, or random older stuff, lmk, I can fill a USPS box for you if you like…
If you’re willing to take it on yourself, then you’ll have to strategize how to handle it. I suggest getting something like a dry erase white board to list out tasks in manageable chunks. If you’re going to itemize things, I would start with the more valuable or accessible stuff first. There’s not a lot of money to be made in the current market, but if you have the time it can be very fulfilling to resurrect out tech.
This is not always true and you can look at various ITAD solution providers claims on their websites, or call and ask them about an overview of their downstream. R2v3 also puts more emphasis on transitioning to reuse instead of direct scrapping if possible, with audit logging and various other reforms applied to keeping things in circulation instead of in dumpsters.
While that is genuinely a step in the right direction, it still relies on the components having a marketable value to pay for all of the labor costs involved in salvaging. Anything that can’t make money is scrapped for raw materials. Then starts the debate of whether something should be destroyed simply for not having any monetary value in the current market, which is probably well outside the scope of this thread so we should probably cap it there. I appreciate the anecdote though.
Well, we can quickly break that down based on the brief list @digdug18 provided.
OP has “many items” new in box items which aren’t regulated under R2 status and are effectively free money for any recycler with an online sales presence. OP also has 4th gen Intel parts, a very easy resale proposition on markets like eBay and testing/logging of those is automated. Very few man hours involved.
Plotters, if known brands and relatively feature rich, can generally fetch reasonable prices, can be quickly tested to power on and feed and can fall under F3 status and be resold with minimal effort, 10 minutes each factoring in setup time.
HDDs are the biggest time hog since they must individually be wiped and tested, and those do generally get shredded since there is no definition within the R2v3 standard as to what level data must be sanitized, so shredding is the least labor intensive solution to the problem. I generally just hand out drives to friends after running them through DBAN if they’re not new in box. A lot of people out there can use an extra HDD, especially if they’ve never considered backing up their data.
Cables, peripheral, batteries, and generally anything considered an accessory will probably be scrapped, that is true.
Though, again, it’s entirely dependent on who you call. Some companies pitch their focus toward reuse, sometimes community outreach programs where they put computers in the hands of people impacted by disaster or are otherwise incapable of acquiring a computer normally. Good360 for example.
Again, check with companies around the state to see what their downstream looks like. Ask if they participate in any charities or state programs. Ask what their reuse policies are. A lot of what @digdug18 claims to have is going to fall within the scope of reuse.
Last e waste facility within 100 miles of me got shut down for illegal dumping, they were pulling the gold off and dumping everything else into the landfill.
See if you can upgrade some of those boxes to a more modern hardware and donate that to your local schools computer club or something like that? A more ambitious project would be to start up a local computer lab where kids can hang out, play some PC and learn how to program stuff.
Another idea is to upgrade the core on a lot of these components, which could net you some extra income. People are happy to pay for new PCs that are discounted, especially if it’s SFF in retro cases. I reckon you could sell most of these systems for roughly $500 each, that is $3000 extra in profit:
