It's given me the idea to look for money where other people see only waste.
My question is twofold: is there anyone on HN making money from refuse or have any ideas / know of any stories of people who are?
I'm always on the lookout for viable b2b opportunities. Do you have domain knowledge of this? Would love to hear more. I would email you but no contact info. Shoot me an email if you're not too busy. Email is in the profile.
When those sweepings are running thin they go into the drains to gather sludge. Gold from jeweller's bodies and on the floors get washed into the drains. This sludge requires a lot of processing to get the gold, so the sludge is sold to a business with the man-power to do it.
They need to grind and dry the sludge. They then slowly wash it over ribbed troughs - the gold stays in the ribs while the dirt washes over. The gold-rich sludge is processed with mercury, glass, soda, and ash. This is melted in a crucible, to give you a gold / silver / mercury blob, which you then process with acid to get gold.
Later I'll put up some short clips of the video showing the various processes because my description isn't good and the programmes are no longer available online. But here's the BBC page for it. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01n8278)
If you don't mind travelling to Ghana you could surely do better than they're doing in Accra - Here's a snippet from a UK TV programme about the e-waste dump in Agbogbloshie. It's pretty depressing. There's no kind of sensible plan to recovering useful stuff. Seeing a boy smashing polyester / polystyrene capacitors off an old PCB with a rock is just grim. I guess by this point you just treat it the ground like ore - dig it up and process it.
(http://videobam.com/rcEUM) (Apologies for the awful video host. Any suggestions?) Here's a link to the original programme (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00sch78)
There's a short clip from the BBC programme on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-dsGzgjkjA
As with everything else in business you find someone who needs X and then see if you can locate a source for a price that allows you to make money.
Ah, you guys, sending me off on a research quest about Sam Zemurray, who I'd never heard of before today!
Google Books has an issue of Life magazine with a big profile of him: http://books.google.com/books?id=2EsEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA92&#...
An issue of The Rotarian mentions him: http://books.google.com/books?id=HUYEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA14&#...
It seems he's part of the entire "banana republic" thing.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/38830389
I haven't seen it, but they promote it heavily for the days that there is no trading.
Tech is there. Issues are mostly:
1. Margins. Transporting this stuff with a low volume/value ratio around too much will make you unprofitable very fast 2. Politics and mafia (yes, mafia, try collecting garbage in South Italy) 3. Capex and investment payback
I think that due to points 1, 2 and 3 you need:
a. Small plants that can be profitable with waste from 2000 inhabitants up b. To provide some sort of benefit for the inhabitants. If you go in a country where the tax on waste is managed by the city hall you have a go there
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/dial-a-dump-sydneys-30... (The Telegraph is hardly Australia's best paper but for the purposes of answering your question I'd say it suffices).
I believe he deals mainly in industrial waste. Google his name (Ian Malouf) to get a fuller picture of his business practices.
What he does is basically just taking all the waste that comes of workers building houses. Then he sells it to the weight.
The magic is that he gets paid by the building companies so that they can leave the site a few days earlier, and he gets paid for the waste he brings back to the factories. Epic win win situation.
Only thing needed to start is a truck, and a few spare hours a week.
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-10-26-100379...
"Where there's muck, there's brass."
I mean, Apple Inc. not discarded apples...
