Comment by ProllyInfamous

6 days ago

>I work in e-waste recycling

How does one get into this, preferably without having to be a yardie for a few years (I'm an electrician with a degree in chemistry)?

Fellow Win7Pro retro machiner.

2 comments

ProllyInfamous

Reply
theandrewbailey  5 days ago

I'm not sure if my story is useful for you: I had a friend working there when they had an opening. He recommended me, and the boss asked if I knew my stuff; he said yes. I'm struggling to remember how my friend got in there.

I work in the refurb division. I walk though the receiving and demanufacturing areas looking for things that would be worth our time to resell.

Though if you have a chemistry degree, you'd probably be more helpful to the people we sell scrap to. From what the boss told me, they're the ones who shred PCBs, drives, etc. and dissolve them in acid to extract metals and other materials, like one would with mined ore.

And our certifications require us to use buyers who don't turn around and ship things off to the third world for "processing": https://sustainableelectronics.org/welcome-to-r2v3/

  • ProllyInfamous  5 days ago

    Thanks for taking time to respond.

    >I had a friend working there

    Also how I got my first tech job, working in a laptop repair facility (on-site for a large engineering team).

    >you'd probably be more helpful to the people we sell scrap to

    Thanks for the certification links (which has a map with hundreds of locations — none near me, but have been looking for a smaller community and this is helpful information).