Recyclers who collect end-of-life electronics items and who want to expand into the repair and reuse market have numerous online resources to tap into, according to presenters at a session at the 2016 Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries Inc. (ISRI) Annual Convention.
Sarah Cade of Chicago-based PC Rebuilders & Recyclers (PCCR) and Jim Lynch of San Francisco-based TechSoup listed a number of Internet-based information sources that can help those venturing into the computer or mobile device refurbishment sector.
Online refurbishment manuals prepared by and posted to www.iFixit.com are available at no charge. Cade and Lynch praised the website’s managers for the body of knowledge collected, their responsiveness to create new manuals and the quality of the disassembly tools sold through the website.
The Repair Association, managers of www.repair.org, provides repair community advice and discussions and also serves as an advocate for the right to repair, according to Cade. The association’s interests include computers, mobile devices and computer-diagnostic automotive repair.
Lynch said his www.TechSoup.org website also provides product and brand-specific guidance on repairs and TechSoup likewise serves as an advocacy group to make the environmental and economic case for widespread repair.
The issues and techniques involved in electronics testing, repair and reuse also will serve as the focus of an upcoming event being organized by Cade and PCCR at the www.ereuseconference.com website. Cade said best practices will be among the foremost topics at the late October 2016 event in Houston.
On the software side, Lynch said Microsoft has long been supportive of the reuse market, offering affordable licensed versions of the Windows operating system and accompanying software to refurbishers. Apple, he indicated, has been much slower to respond to the repair and reuse market.
Panelist Chris Ko of Revive IT, with locations in Phoenix and Memphis, called refurbishing “an art, not a science,” but said those who get it right can achieve “astronomical” profit margins compared to reducing all collected equipment to secondary commodities.
He said the process consists of acquiring material, assessing its value, testing it, cleaning it, documenting one’s inventory, bringing it to market and shipping it. The testing process, he said, can be as simple as “powering on the device” to see whether it is in working order. Companies seeking to do more complicated testing will need to hire trained or trainable bench technicians.
Craig Boswell of Batavia, Illinois-based HOBI International Inc. said that with the United States having some 182 million smartphone users and some 2.45 billion mobile devices shipped worldwide in 2015, the size of the refurbishing and repair market for devices is considerable.
Boswell said data security is an increasingly important part of the repair process, with this factor helping reduce the attractiveness of donating old phones to charity.
Partly as a result, many device owners simply store their old phones in a drawer, with Boswell citing one estimate that 57 percent of American device owners have one or more idle cell phones in their home.
The collection business model is likely to change further, said Boswell, as service providers shift toward leasing out smartphones rather than outright selling them to users. “
The ISRI 2016 Convention & Exposition was April 2-7 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas.