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Many ask where they can find old and discarded equipment on hte trailing
edge of technology. The article below suggests some answers. It is from
Wired Magazine.
kelly
F E A T U R E S | Issue 5.09 - September 1997
Dumpster Diving
There's big bucks in tech trash.
by Cory Doctorow
When my grandfather came to Toronto after the war, arriving via
Halifax on a refugee boat from Hamburg, he went into business as a
rag-and-bone man, riding a horse-drawn cart through the streets,
salvaging scrap metal, fabric, paper - trash. Eventually, the
business grew into a scrap yard and produced the money for a
split-level ranch home in the burbs, university educations for his
kids, and a condo in Fort Lauderdale for his retirement years. He
built his house on garbage, but that fact never struck home for me
until I met Darren.
Tonight, Darren, Mike, and I are cruising through the selfsame
suburb in Darren's police-auction paddy wagon. Darren handles the
armored truck like my grandfather drove his Caddy - fast enough to
make a committed cyclist like myself ßinch, but with a great deal
of precision as he weaves in and out of late-night traffic on the
icy streets.
We're whipping through sprawling, one-story industrial plazas,
slowing only to take a closer look at the dumpsters. We're all
bitheads, but we're not looking for unshredded hard copy - that's
old news. We're after tastier trash.
Finally, we spy a likely-looking site, a strip mall where the lone
restaurant is perpetually going out of business. Mike puts on the
superwarm jester's hat his mom made for him the year before he
dropped out of electrical engineering at Ryerson Polytech. Darren
pulls into the driveway, past the circling minivans of parents
waiting to pick up kids from swimming lessons at the strip mall,
and pulls up around back, along a row of dumpsters. He tugs a
woolly toque over his long hair, zips up his army-surplus jacket,
and puts on his heavy leather gloves.
I grab my own gloves and scramble to catch up. Darren's already
headfirst in a dumpster, and a minivan is pulling up 20 yards from
us, switching on its high beams. Darren looks at it. "A fucking
vigilante. Thinks I'm here to steal" - like it's a dirty word. "Let
him sit there. It's working light."
Darren dives back into the dumpster,flashlight clenched between his
teeth. He tosses something onto the ice at my feet. It's a 3/
4
-inch Beta cassette, labeled "Bonanza Episode 87-5654." I peer
cautiously over the dumpster's edge. Hundreds of broadcast-quality
tapes. Darren pushes them aside, looking for something with a
higher dollar-to-dimensions ratio. The paddy wagon's already
half-full of spent laser toner cartridges and 386s, which occupy a
lot of volume in a cargo space designed, after all, to transport
humans in shackles, not the high tech detritus of Toronto's
proßigate industrial parks.
There's nothing but reruns in the first dumpster, so Darren moves
on. He casts long, weird shadows in the minivan's headlights. I
stare into their glare and try to imagine what the guy behind the
wheel is thinking. What must he make of three guys in their 20s,
jumping in and out of the trash? What if he calls the cops? It
makes me nervous. I mean, what we're doing isn't actually illegal
or anything. Trash is a strange legal gray zone in Canada. The
Trespass to Property Act - a hunk of legislation dating back to the
British North America Act of 1867 - grants property owners and
their rent-a-cops the power to ban anyone from the premises, for
any reason, forever. The catch is, they have to actually ask you to
leave - serve you with a notice prohibiting entry - then you have
to return for it to be trespassing. And ever since a cop dug
through a curbside trash can, looking for a ditched weapon used in
a holdup, and the judge ruled that he needed no search warrant to
do so, Canada's garbage has become fair game. So as long as we
don't make a mess - that would be littering - we're on the warm and
fuzzy side of the law.
Darren hits pay dirt in dumpster number two. "Active-matrix LCDs!"
he says, and starts frisbeeing the displays to Mike, who stacks
them, dozens of them, on one of the prisoner benches inside the
truck.
Then suddenly Darren stops, holds one up, and his five o'clock
shadow splits in a wide grin. He smashes the LCD against the frozen
corner of the dumpster. "I got 500 of these things back home," he
exclaims. "It's a fuckin' clown show!"
He's right - it's all absurd. In less than an hour, I've seen
literally tens of thousands of dollars' worth of equipment, most of
it too low on the dollars-to-volume graph to bother with. All of it
in the trash. Darren's got a quarter-million-dollar recording
studio, built entirely out of garbage, in a warehouse a couple
blocks from my own studio. Upstairs, in a soundproofed mezzanine,
is a room completely jammed with baroque computer trash: old SGI
servers, NT boxes, 21-inch monitors, cables from here to Hong Kong,
shrink-wrapped software, bookcases overßowing with manuals. That's
just the stuff he didn't sell. Ten Darrens couldn't even make a
dent.
The vigilante behind the headlights apparently decides he's not
going to be a hero tonight. He switches back to low beams and pulls
away.
We knock off early. It's cold out, a vicious icy windy bastard of a
Toronto night. Out in the burbs, there's nothing to cut the gales,
and they find the chinks in your long underwear and scarves.
We head downtown for Vietnamese salad rolls. I'm mentally
cataloging tonight's haul: a bushel of gold-tipped RCA cables for
Darren, 20-some PCMCIA modems, the LCDs, some old 386s, laser toner
cartridges - to buy it all new would cost thousands. Darren will
sell it for less than a grand. Still, it's pretty good money for
three or four hours' work.
Cruising through Chinatown, looking for a parking spot, we pass an
electronics store with a sign in the window: "16MB SIMMs - $800!"
This sparks a story from Darren.
"Yeah, I was at this distributor out in Mississauga, and they had a
dumpster filled with little cardboard boxes, like so" - he takes
both hands off the wheel to form an 8-inch square - "and they each
had a sticker that said 'Empty Box, Do Not Open.' You get that a
lot, empty boxes they stick in packing crates so the stuff won't
shift around. I see one of these boxes, sealed, but with no label.
I think, well, maybe someone in Japan just forgot to put a sticker
on it, and maybe someone in Toronto didn't bother to look inside,
and I open it, and there's 10 16-meg SIMMs inside. Eight thousand
dollars' worth of RAM! And people wonder why RAM costs so much.
Sold it for five grand."
Over green tea, Darren starts to get philosophical. It's an
occupational hazard. You can't spend half your time alone in
dumpsters without formulating trash cosmologies.
"Those guys who go after tin cans and pop bottles, those garbage
pickers, they're fuckin' nuts! Why waste your time on a nickel
bottle, when you can sell an empty toner cartridge for 10 or 20
bucks? They're nuts, man." He looks genuinely upset. He gets upset
when he talks trash. But he also swells with pride, describing this
strange little niche he's carved for himself.
"I got caught in somebody's trash one night, and the next time I
went back, I found 10 CD-ROM drives, and they'd smashed 'em up with
hammers, so I couldn't sell 'em." He grimaces. "It's criminal. This
is useful stuff! Why would they want it to end up in a landfill?"
Good question.
Darren takes me out again, just the two of us in his landlady's
ancient Buick. The night starts slowly, as we cruise past empty
dumpsters.
We're in Motorola country, but that dumpster - source of hundreds
offlip phones and batteries - is off-limits these days. Darren, it
seems, dropped in one night and found someone else already in the
trash. Two guys, in fact, pulling out featureless black boxes, the
likes of which he'd never seen. The guys became, well, aggressive,
and chased him off. Darren figures they were pros, industrial spies
working with someone on the inside to spirit out top-secret tech
via the trash.
It turns out some dumpster divers come from the other side of the
thin blue line as well. "The cops around here like to pull me
over," Darren explains, "just to see what kind of stuff I've got
tonight. A couple months ago, I got some sports cards from this
place, and they pull me over, and the cop says, 'Are you kidding
me? You found these in the trash? My kid spends a fortune on
these.' So I come back a couple nights later and bam, there's the
cop, headfirst in the trash. Hell, I don't care. Plenty more where
that came from.
"Speaking of which," Darren says, "there's another place I want to
check out. They moved a couple months ago, but they still haven't
put a dumpster out at the old site. There's got to be tons of
stuff, just waiting to be trashed."
And there is. Acer America Corporation has a big old 40-cubic-yard
dumpster out. It's about a third full. Darren smiles and sticks the
end of hisflashlight between his teeth.
This dumpster is the night's big score. We find 400 laptop
batteries, five 15-inch Trinitron tubes, half a dozen laptop hard
drives, most of a carton of shrink-wrapped PowerPC monitor adapters
- I wince thinking of the 60 bucks I shelled out for one a few
weeks back - voltmeters, multitesters, and enough miscellaneous
monitor hardware to fill the whole backseat of the Buick. Cash
value? Ten thousand Canadian (around US$7,150).
Of course, it's going to take some effort to turn this garbage into
money. There's a guy who takes in the monitor trash, and for every
two units he can build from it, Darren gets one. Only half the
laptop batteries can be salvaged, by cannibalizing what good cells
remain from the other half. The salvage guy will keep half of
those. That leaves Darren with 100 power packs, retail C$200 - if
he can find a buyer at $75 a pop, that's $7,500 right there.
After a good two hours sorting the trash and loading the car,
Darren carefully restores the dumpster to its original state,
making sure that the same kinds of trash are back on top, that
there are no suspicious holes or visible bootprints. With luck,
Acer will refill the dumpster over the next week; once the trash is
up to the rim, Darren can start tunneling, building corridors
shored up with cardboardflats from the recycling bin a few yards
off.
Around 2 a.m., Darren drops me off at home, a couple blocks from
his multimedia studio, then heads home to unpack the haul. I'd
offer to help, but I'm freezing, and my stomach is one big bruise
from using it as the fulcrum to lever myself into the dumpster.
Darren, on the other hand, is as graceful as a gymnast, vaulting
dumpster lips, making impossible twists in tight corners, stooping
double for long stretches while he burrows.
Acer America Corporation doesn't know what to make of my phone
call: "Hi, I'm a freelancer writing a piece about a guy who made 10
grand off stuff you threw out when you moved."
I end up being transferred to Marc DeNola, head of security and
safety.
"Every product," he intones, "has a product life. In a high tech
field, the product life can be quite short. At some point, a
decision has to be made as to whether there is any salvage value.
When something is discarded, it means that the storage costs are
greater than the value of the item."
Why not donate the discards to charity, or hold a yard sale, or
give them to schools?
Karen Grant, of Acer's PR company Editorial Edge Inc., insists that
schools aren't interested in salvage - they want complete, working
systems. As for yard sales, "It's something we'll have to look
into."
So then why are the dumpsters at the new Acer site kept indoors,
behind locked doors?
"It's part of the comprehensive security program," DeNola explains.
"These days, we take security much more seriously."
Cory Doctorow ([log in to unmask]) is a science fiction writer,
columnist, and multimedia developer.
Copyright © 1993-97 Wired Magazine Group Inc. All rights reserved.
Compilation Copyright © 1994-97 Wired Digital Inc. All rights reserved.
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