Last week ,one of the buildings on the property I work at had a recycle bin setup for electronics. scored 2 Elitebook 8470p laptops ,memory and hard drives missing. A Dell Inspiron 530s fully functional, A HP Compaq 8510p laptop fully functional. I happen to have a power adapter that would work for the Elitebooks,and I have memory and 2.5 drives on hand. I installed drives and memory to both Elitebooks (Core i5) and they worked . I had to erase all the programs and pictures left on the Dell Inspiron (windows 7). I did the same with the HP 8510p (windows XP). I saw a lot of stuff destroyed to be unusable. There are always a bunch of Fax/printer combos in these things. This particular building does this at twice a year for tenants to off load unwanted electronics.

Our recycle bins for electronics are locked up, sadly. You cannot rescue anything from them that way. The reason why they lock them up is simple: Stuff inside is worth money to the recycling company, and they want to dismantle it themselves. Trying not to think too hard about all the nice things that could be in there...

And I work at a recycling center so I get dibs

The craziest find I ever did though was a Salora Fellow, one of those old 8-bit home computers, over ten years ago, at the city dump. Finding an old computer like that would've been a nice find in itself, but this one was not only in box but came with all the accessories that were also in box! Unfortunately I couldn't get the tape drive to read the tapes and I had no way to figure out if the fault was in the computer, the tape deck or the tapes, so I sold the lot.

I get random stuff from work that is getting binned. In the past and at the moment electrical goes to rubbish (garbage) but there are new laws now so it will change to e-waste recycling. I get more than just electrical though...I have a problem

What I got today:
Small lot of PS2 and a few original Xbox games.
PS2 memory card.
IBook G4/1.2 & power adapter.
Sony BDP-S360 with user manual, missing RMT-B104P remote but I had a spare RMT-B107P remote at home from another Sony model that works

I get a lot of cool stuff from work but it’s usually scrap that’s good for many other things. My company makes and uses a lot of test equipment so I get free 18” rack stuff, Eurocard sized extruded rails, etc that I can use to make cases for DIY synthesizers at home. It’s not as exciting as pulling a working DVD player out of the bin but it’s actually much more expensive to buying those racks and stuff than it is get a good DVD player so it works for me. We recently EOLed an entire test package so I have a bunch of these cool 1’x1’ black aluminum cubes I’m going to make into display cases for models.

We don't get DVD players often at work, working or otherwise, but more often than not they're some weird off-brand model and missing the remote so even though they ostensibly work, they're pretty much useless unless they're one of those older models that actually had buttons on the front panels, especially the direction ones since you can't navigate the menus without those. Somebody (might've come from a school actually) brought in a Pioneer one and I gave that one to my parents since their (my) old Sony player was starting to develop this annoying fault where it'd just randomly turn itself off in the middle of a movie.

I thought somebody had brought in a Laserdisc player once but it turned out to be just a five CD changer. In hindsight, I wish I'd grabbed it anyway.

So essentially when someone donates to a charity shop and are expecting their decent item to be sold with the proceeds going to help homeless people or whatever it actually just goes to a home of one of the workers like you?

That seems kinda wrong to me.

Well the place determines stuff to be worthless and therefore thrown out. Better it get taken by employees than actually tossed out.

Is that what happens really do you think? A working blu ray player and working PS2 and Xbox games are determined "worthless"? Really?

Who said the place donates money to homeless people or whatever???

I walked into my one local home build/donation place and saw that after 1 full year of donations sales etc. They were able to build
a whopping 11 houses

You would think after 1 year of selling off stuff and getting it for free and not paying any of the volunteer workers they would
be able to build more than 11 houses in the entire state........

The BD player had no remote. The unit only has power, eject, play and stop buttons.
Yes it was working but not fully functional.
I made it fully functional because I had a compatible remote (from another model player) at home.

Work does not give things away to poor people, that's not how charities operate now. It's all about selling donations to generate as much money as possible to help support poor people...because the government doesn't do enough.
Things are deemed "worthless" when they are not worth the effort. Furniture that is broken (we don't make repairs), clothes that are dirty (we don't do a cleaning service), electrical items missing parts/accessories needed for full functionality. Any media missing covers...an exception to this is old video games carts, we've sold NES/SNES/N64 carts loose.

Nearly everything I get from work isn't actually free, even if it's getting binned. I still pay a token amount but not for small individual items.

So what happens is instead of more stuff going to the skip (which costs money to empty), I help remove some items that are deemed worthless.

Video games? Well there's usually a reason, a common one is disc only...eg it was found in a disc wallet along with some other games.
I also grab games missing discs. PC games are always thrown out so I grab them too.

There just isn't enough storage space at work to make piles of games missing discs or covers and then combine what is there to make something that can be sold. We never usually get any Xbox games worth much anyway, no Panzer Dragoon Orta or Panzer Elite Action Fields of Glory. I did get Ninja Gaiden Black there some time ago but I paid a couple of $ for it, which is the price that would've gone on it if it was put out in the store.


Edit:
The iBook G4 - we don't sell computers unless they can be restored to factory state. This G4 tested ok but was stuck on boot logo plus it was covered in kid's stickers and had a name written on the case in permanent marker. Boss said it can't be sold so destined for the bin.
I grabbed it because I was curious, took it home and did some googling. Managed to get it to boot after some reading and messing around but the HDD is unstable (it won't boot properly sometimes). I'll have to swap out the HDD and do a fresh install (I have a donor HDD here in my spares but haven't done this little project yet).

I've cleaned the whole thing very well now, even the perm marker name - used eucalyptus oil. Still has some scratches on the case but it's ok for something 15 years old and obviously used by kids.

Yeah it does, in Australia almost all of them do. There are some exceptions, like in Vic we have Savers that is a profit making venture I think (US chain?) and in the ACT where I live we have the Green Shed where the profits go to the ACT government to make them even richer.



That sounds pretty good to me. In Australia, anywhere near a city a house costs minimum $500K with land to build.

I wish someone could build me a house, I'll probably rent my whole life because if you're single on one lowish income like me it's just completely out of reach to buy here.

No remote isn't fully functional and you couldn't sell it for $10 or something? Okay I'll take your word for it.



I know that's why I said: "when someone donates to a charity shop and are expecting their decent item to be sold with the proceeds going to help homeless people or whatever"

Although I have seen staff give away blankets and warm clothes to old people in Vinnies and the Salvos during winter.

That's it I'm volunteering at the Salvos, I didn't realise it was such a good scam. "Oh s**t this Neo Geo Metal Slug cart just came in, well if we put it out we would put $2 on it so I'll just take that for $2! Cool!"

The unit only has power, eject, play and stop buttons. It isn't fully functional because you have no way of navigating anything, or changing settings. Some older BD players can sometimes have more buttons on the unit, DVD players too, but plenty of them only have a few basic buttons.
It's an old BD player too so even if it had a remote it would've only had like $15 put on it.



You can't price things for yourself, it doesn't work like that. So you can forget about asking to volunteer and then spending your time twiddling your thumbs doing basically nothing until something catches your eye, sticking a $2 price tag on it, buying it then telling the boss you're done for the day and going home.
No way a Neo Geo cart would have $2 put on it, unless your boss was a complete idiot Which is pretty unlikely, even if they had no clue what it's worth they'd try to google or at least resort to sending it off for sale via the Salvos ebay store.

It isn't a scam, it's work. If you don't like helping out and doing what's asked of you then expect the boss to say something like "don't bother coming back here you aren't actually helping".

Years ago it was a kind of scam, as people would volunteer and get all kinds of really valuable stuff dirt cheap. But that was decades ago and you only hear stories about that now, less as time goes on.
Store managers aren't just some random employee that has the responsibility for running the shop, they're all about trying to generate store targets for the day etc just like any business.

The only thing even slightly scammy about Salvos volunteering is the 20% staff discount. Which isn't really a proper scam as it's the same discount pension card (and some others like carers card I think) holders get.
So no scam, but the general public doesn't have access to the rubbish because; OH&S.

the whole charity industry in Australia is a scam these days. Why do charities have paid executives and flashy headquarters? Tax free income that should be going to the needy actually goes to paid employees. Don't even get me started on commission based charity muggers...I almost punched one in the face the other day. f**k OFF

Employees still pay income tax, why do you think they don't?

Never said they didn't. The entity doesn't pay tax so can afford the big pay packets for executives, nice offices, "company" cars etc. It's b******t, it all comes out of people's goodwill. If people actually knew that a big percentage of what they give actually goes to some suit or a charity mugger then I doubt they'd be as generous.

I get why you're angry, but tbh it would be better if you worried about tax money being spent on the wrong things. Too much public money is wasted in this country and spending should be increased on a load of things that are important.

If the government actually cared about the poor there would be less strain on charities, so less need for such charities to operate like big business to generate huge amounts of money.

You'd be surprised. It's stupid but the thrift here asks more for DVD players than they do BD players. And yes I know BD players are DVD players too but it just goes to the point of they are trying to sell this stuff to the common/average person that walks in the door and honestly that person wants Netflix now if they can get it.

Forper I understand where you are coming from (I won't shop at Goodwill) but it's a bit misguided to be mad at employees far down the rung. They aren't the ones making a killing while pretending to help people and it's a job the same as any other so they have to be paid.

I hate how charities stores have become since it seems more of a business than actually helping people. I just wish I have another option besides that and ebay to find good stuff. Garage sales are a hit or miss and mostly been misses so I've given up on those.