recycledmatt

Awesome to see AoE, and games in general being future proofed. Sad when functionality is lost because someone turned off a server.

The nuanced answer to this is they have a first mover advantage and make a great robot. The point of the thread is that new development is much cheaper for folks to figure it out. Recyclers are the most entrepreneurial people you will ever meet. we’ll figure out some good uses for this stuff when it gets cheaper.

Super familiar. Thanks!

Folks in the industry are certainly thinking about this. The economic forces at play could be huge.

Most folks when they think of recycling, think of the blue bin they put out every week.

That’s about 25% by weight of all that gets recycled in the country.

Metals, industrial scrap, and other sources are 75% of what gets recycled in the US.

We are blue collar businesses, with high labor costs. Many are exploring robotics actively for repetitive tasks. We have some robots in our process, looking for more when the ROI makes sense.

It may not be 100x, but there will be value in robots in recycling.

They would be busy ferrying troops and supplies. Amateurs talk about tactics, professionals discuss logistics!

Yes - but they paint with a big brush. Unfortunately legitimate repair and reuse is caught in the mix and made much more difficult.

Lawyers and lobbyists paid lots of money to figure out how to subvert stuff.

OEMs may work to make stuff less consumer repairable/upgradeable to force folks to use their repair services that need stuff like bga reballing or soldering. Bye bye upgradable ram slots!

Things like software locks and restrictions in the name of ‘security’ will lock stuff down and make repair harder (see Apple’s part pairing)

Cool, let’s work on plastics!

Long after you are gone, you are going to give some Junk Removal person a heart attack.

Fascinating. Did she work in medical / hard science? I could imagine some exposure to radiation / magnetization could do this.

Supposed to flambé it

Not sure where you buy your steaks, but you are overpaying.

It’s called slippage - the order book doesn’t have 51% of all the shares immediately for sale at the right this second offer price.

Figured I was about to read how fierce competition degraded margins in a highly competitive industry - everyone has their biases

// How well can it be recycled at end-of-life?

The fact that the chemistries are changing and diverse is the most difficult thing from an End-of-life perspective. A lot of businesses born around recycling todays battery (lots of lithium and cobalt relatively speaking) are not economical on some of the newer chemistries (looking at you Li-Fe) because they cheapened out the expensive elements.

I would have to see the exact complaint. One interesting piece is that cameras are sold in the US by Nikon USA, and in the EU by Nikon Europe. It is possible that some regulations like Weee compliance, or maybe right to repair (manuals maybe?) that this older model does not comply with all of the EU law. Still ridiculous, but a possible different angle they are approaching it from.

E scrap contains a high proportion of potentially hazardous metals and materials which is why it has an outsized influence over just the volume. It is the fastest growing waste segment, and a large contributor of Heavy Metals.

They took the existing components and supercharged them. This thing is exponentially more expensive per cubic inch.

It’s called a red herring argument - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring

The value here isn’t decided by the plastics. We are talking lithium, cobalt, copper as primary recovery. There are tons of interesting angles in plastic recycling. Engineered plastics do have value, other polymers not as much

When they talk about Damage Defective Return being under 5% - that is major failures. When it’s not DDR - it’s in the same form it was from the OEM

Redwood has been getting a lot of press lately over their potential $2 billion dollar loan (https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2023/02/09/redwood-...), but what shocks me with this is how low volume their process is now. I talk a lot about scale and volume in recycling - but 250NT of material is nothing. Some large car shredders generate that much in fluff/ADC in a day, and there are dozens of them operating around the country.

We recycle about 12 million cars a year in the US - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_recycling - this is 1,268 cars worth of batteries. We have a long way to go!

Mining virgin materials uses much more resources than recycling. The material is already concentrated in the to be recycled items. Strong environmental controls must be in place with the recycling companies, but the impacts are less. Plus you have to think of the regulatory environment where the items are being processed. A domestic to US recycler, with threat of RCRA (Superfund) has incentives to make sure they are following best practices.

The trick will be doing the front end of the process more local to material (size reduction and separation) and then doing refining at larger plants. They will shred the batteries, pull out plastics and metals, and concentrate the black mass. This is the good stuff, and you will reduce the mass and dimensions considerably.

This is driven by tax policy more than anything. It’s cheaper to make the pool of available stock smaller vs distribute as a dividend.

The CEO’s fiduciary duty is to shareholder value. The rest is a game.

They went from working 51.5 hours to 50 hours a week… could this be driven by less commuting more work from home? Same amount of work done in less time?

Generally speaking, this works to unlock one off devices (and not mdm) but if you went to them with bulk serials to unlock they would tell you to go away. The scale recyclers operate at this does not work.

This is right next to the wife’s hometown. People are very excited. The nearby Monmouth Racetrack has been in decline for a long time, and it has impacted local tax revenue. Only getting worse with online sports betting.

Already there is a brewery and some other restaurants going in on the base. The base is huge - this is just a small portion of the development happening.

Copper too!