We store any and all electronics parts that we are unable to sell or give away to someone who finds it useful. We recently collected enough that it was time to find someone to recycle all the parts. We emailed and called over 10 firms before we got one that would work with us. It was like Goldilocks, we were either too big for organizations that dealt with household waste and too small for corporate recyclers. Thanks to Earth911 and RecylingNJ, we finally found Sims Recycling which has a new plant close by our warehouse in NJ. Information on what they do with the parts are here.
All in all, we recycled 253 pounds of parts ranging dating back from 2005. The obvious question is how we can have fewer components that need recycling in the future.
Find People Who Value the Components: We had a bunch of left over LED cables that we couldn’t use in any of our bags. We found that lots of people wanted them and we gave them away via this blog. We’d like to do more of this.
Fewer Components: Adapter plugs for UK AC adapters made up a big portion of the weight. We came up against a large minimum order quantity and simply had more than we needed on hand. When we switched over to a battery that charged from any USB port, we were able to make the AC charger an optional component thus eliminating nearly all waste in this category.
Reduce Spec Failure: We test all incoming parts to conformance with our specification and sometimes they fail. In one case several years ago, we had several thousand USB adapters that didn’t work properly with Apple’s USB cable. In another, the circuit box that connects panels together was missing a necessary resistor. We’ve greatly reduced this type of failure by doing more testing of initial samples, ordering smaller initial orders (especially with new suppliers) and by finding suppliers that we trust to produce high quality components.
Concurrent Ordering: While not perfect, we try to align all of our component purchases and not order too much of a single part, especially if it is dependent on another component. For example, we changed the size of the plug on each of our solar panels from 3.5×1.3mm to 3.5×1.1mm. If we had too many circuit boxes in the old size, they would need to be discarded (and some were).
As with everything, reducing waste is an ongoing process and one that we hope to continue to get better at.
If you are looking to sell off surplus components please contact me at 845-790-3078. I will buy them
What type of items do you tend to give away or send to recyclers?
If you find surplus ever think of contacting know surplus companies like Electronics Goldmine?
Also as a tinker and maker let me know if you have anything that might be of use 🙂
Kevin G
Hi Kevin,
We will sometimes offer beat up (but working) solar panels and other parts that people might find useful for free on this blog and/or on our facebook page. We would definitely rather reuse than recycle. Thanks for pointing out Electronics Goldmine, we’ll keep them in mind when we run up against a surplus. This was the first time using a recycler over almost a five year period. So we’re not really recycling much. We hope to not send too much to them in a future, but it is good to have that relationship when we can’t find takers for the parts.
Jeff