Remember the old mantra of reduce > reuse > recycle? Environmental consumerism is supposed to be primarily focused on reducing when you can. If you cannot reduce consumption, then try to reuse as much as possible. And if you've exhausted reduce or reuse, then you try to recycle.

Everything can be reduced and reused if you're willing to spend enough money. But obviously you have to recycle if the other options are too expensive. Environmentalists seem to forget that spending money is itself a waste - a waste of human effort and natural resources even if it saves something tangible like a wheel or an electric motor.

I was walking in our electronics department's hallway when I stopped and walked a few steps back. My peripheral vision picked up a pile of yummy: a load of lab gear in an office. I went in and asked about it. The person said they were to be discarded. I asked if I could take some. They said they were to be sold by the kilogram to a company. I asked if I could buy a few kilograms of oscilloscopes, multimetres, stabilized power sources, etc. They said no. Regulations, auctions, etc.

Here I was, a broke electronics student, trying to procure electronics equipment, in an electronics department, with lunch money I was willing to part with, but unable to do so because someone needed to melt that thing down and make a horse shoe or some fork.

Somebody already bought the picking rights. I would have gone over the head of the person you asked, or call in a favor with someone at the same level of hierarchy. Ask them if you can have some of the stuff. If they say yes, tell the first person x said it's fine, and just take what you are allowed to take.

Their red tape is only your problem if you can't self-help. It's not your job to enforce their agreements with third parties who aren't you. It's also not your job to inform them of existing agreements with third parties which you are privy to.

Oh, the things I would have done in that situation if it took place somewhere where you don't get disappeared for a Facebook post, friend. I'll leave it at that.

The underlying context is that I was practically a persona non grata. Teachers would happily leave the class to me during labs but hated the fact I barely attended. I'm talking not even grading your exam sheet, or putting an arbitrary grade, and not displaying it until the recourse deadline has passed because "screw you" and I'm talking putting "0" on all your grades because you missed one exam. Nobody will take the side of a student who'll be there for a limited time against a colleague they've worked with for 20+ years. Even if the behavior is unjust, the rationale for them is that you'll live and learn and forget about it and leave, but they're staying and have to work with the other person.

Sure, the obvious step is to go manoeuver or call out these practices, invovle lawyers, and the media, and what not. Which brings me to my first paragraph. What is obvious and possible somewhere isn't somewhere else, or is but the stakes are too high. If I wanted to manoeuver in a cesspool, I would have become a politician. If I wanted to go to war, I would have become a martyr. The former is frowned upon, the latter is admired in other people from a distance.

This sounds like you encountered corruption, not waste.

Not certain, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were the case in that specific instance.

I had the opposite experience with one of my old electronics teachers. The place was was replacing a bunch (40-50 or so) of 100Mbps rackmount switches with gigabit versions (this was mid-2000s, so 100Mbps was still more than adequate for home use). I can't remember the exact scenario, but they were either selling the old ones as scrap or had to pay for them to be recycled. My teacher said I could skim whatever I wanted off the top, providing I didn't make it too public (I don't think he asked permission, just knew they wouldn't be missed).

A 48-port switch (Netgear FS750T or something very similar), as well as a couple of 16-port versions and a hub that had somehow still been in use, was probably overkill for home use, but I wasn't complaining.

This is so annoying.

I was luckier one time: I remember buying an oscilloscope for around 400NOK (about $40) back somewhere in 2002-2003.

Other times I was more persistent. Once I tried to get some PC parts so I said I could disassemble it and only take the exact parts at which point the bloke told me he'd rather want me to take the whole thing as lo g as I was quick so nobody saw it :-)

I bought a nice oscilloscope last year from the pawn shop for $40. I don't think most of their clientele (or the staff) even knew what it was.

>I don't think most of their clientele (or the staff) even knew what it was.

I bought a pair of nice Roland studio-level reference monitor speakers from a pawn shop like that once. They cost me 90 dollars, they retailed for something like 1750.

When I paid the person behind the counter told me that many people had tried to get these to work and brought them back because they couldn't figure out the cable to use -- and due to that difficulty they had marked them down from 200 to 90.

It was an XLR plug. They worked beautifully.

Pawn shops are filled with audio gear from desperate, broke artists. XLR is a pretty standard in the audio community. I even have a 2.5mm-to-XLR adapter on my desk. This pawn shop must be really far from any place with performance venues.

Now on the other hand I had some old Bang and Olufsen speakers that used proprietary everything. Even the audio input was some kind of balanced 24V signaling 5-pin DIN connectors. Basically you could not plug into anything except another B&O.

P.S.: I did tell the staff what it was, but they just shrugged their shoulders. So I paid $40.

I was in the same predicament when a student. They said they’d give me my pick of scope if I went through a checked out the other 20 that were to be sold. 30 years later I still have that 20 MHz Tek scope.

And with proper care and feeding, that Tek 20 MHz scope will be working in another 30 years. They were well built to put it mildly. I have a friend who's scope is a Tek 500 series, I think 30MHz, built around 50 years ago. Works fine once it warms up. He uses it for audio work, so 30Mhz is mostly overkill.

I have a 2465B (400 MHz analog) that I re-capped a few years ago. What a great scope.

When a uni department replaced all their Macs, I got my hands on a power Mac G4 Cube (yes, one of those that sits in the MoMA). I haven't been able to fix it (something's fried) but I plan to keep the shell and most of the innards as well as the awesome take-out mechanism and add an RPi or something else inside. Passively cooled and beautiful enough to display in the living room...

>On one hand, how would it benefit their/Lime's business to have loads of people owning electric scooters and bikes

I see these as different use cases. I own an eBike which I use for commuting. I also use Lime bikes (before they shut down) to get around the city. The key difference is storage. If I take MY bike, I have to very securely lock it up, carry a heavy lock and chain around, and worry about whether my destination has storage. As such, it only gets me between work, home, and occasionally the store.

On the other hand, I use Lime bikes to get across the city anywhere. If I'm going to a brewery or a concert or whatever, I just get close to my destination, find an out of the way, and get off the bike. It's significantly easier.

Sometimes you need a one-way mode of transportation. They are great for that.

This could have been a commuter vehicle for someone who could not afford a car. I get that the business is disincentivized, but this is such a waste.

Commuter bikes use non-standard parts to limit theft among other reasons. These bikes aren't end-user repairable using off the shelf parts.

The quantity involved creates its own shelf.

Agreed, but unfortunately legal liabilities create huge wastes like this. It's why grocery stores go through extensive efforts to ensure you can't recover their thrown out good that has reached it's sell by date but is still good.

In the US, the Good Samaritan Food Donation Act of 1996 eliminates the liability of grocery stores from donating or allowing people to "glean" food that it no longer can sell. If you know of a store that is destroying this type of food, please let them know that they can donate it without worrying about getting sued.

Yep, generally if you find food on the shelf that has past its sell-by date, they will give it to you for free.

It does underline the point though. A law had to be made almost 25 years ago to prevent this with food and people are still worried. Doesn't paint a rosy picture for everything else.

It depends on how things got there. If the law was made because of unjustified paranoia, to settle it, then you can't use the existence of that law as justification for the paranoia.

I don't believe that's the case for one second. People sell second hand cars/motorcycles/bicycles/rollerblades all the time without worrying about liability afterwards, otherwise you'd be saying that US has no market for second hand equipment.

What legal liability is this exactly? People buy used bikes, motorcycles and cars all the time. Both from companies as well as other individuals.

What legal liability would prevent them from selling, or even just giving them away "as is - where is"?

If you own an e-bike you can reason that you don't need a car. You still need a car once in a while. That's the time to call an Uber. You may even ride an Uber every day, but you don't buy a car because you want to start riding your bike tomorrow because it is good for your health.

My naive thought is that these could easily be auctioned off with no claim they are fit for purpose. Recycling should be a last resort.

It appears these bikes were designed to not be user serviceable. Bespoke tools are needed to do any maintenance and there aren't off the shelf parts for anyone who would need anything replaced. This seems very different than selling a used car where the new owner would still have some expectation of being able to service and repair it. Presumably they also have bespoke chargers and not enough to sell with every bike so some people would be buying e-bikes that can't ever be charged.

That's not an argument for not making them available. But it does substantially decrease the value. It's possible it pushes the value below what they'd get from recycling. If that's the case, it's easy to see why they'd recycle them instead of spending more time/money to try to sell a non-servicable and non-chargeable used bike.

They could sell the bikes dirt cheap, and make up the losses selling the proprietary tools.

If the dirt cheap cost is substantially lower than the recycle price, why would they do that?

To save some tons of CO2.

Not part of the current economic model (it doesn't make or save them any money). Certainly not that of the kind of company behind this.

That's the thing: it should matter, by law. The big problem with the actual model, is that it doesn't take into account externalities (pollution, rarefaction of ressources, ...).

That's literally why we have as-is warranties.

> On one hand, how would it benefit their/Lime's business to have loads of people owning electric scooters and bikes?

It stimulates demand for cycling/scooting infrastructure. A few owners of scooters aren't competing with renters.

> auction off the stuff as-is

That's pretty close to what recycling does, for items that can't be practically used due to design issues. The metals and batteries are resold as scrap.

Sell them in cities where electric bikes are not yet legal to start a grass roots movement to legalize them, which opens up a market.