The Old Hand: where there is muck there is money

A local development contractor paid my father-in-law a lot of money to tip one hundred tons of dirt on his land. He is now selling it for twenty pounds per ton to local people for their gardens. “Where there’s muck, there’s money” is an old saying that has been used for decades in the farming fraternity.

The used mobile phone market has the same analogy. If you don’t already know that the recycling of technology is a huge international business, then you should know.

Companies like IBM have been recycling for years. They have a separate department called Global Asset Recovery Services (GARS), which has a turnover of more than USD$3 billion annually by themselves. In the early days, they leased servers and desktops to large corporate clients. When the lease expired, they took back the product. Not knowing what to do with the returns they soon realized that they could refurbish the servers and desktops and re-lease them back into their corporate clients, acquiring a so-called “double bubble.”

Before 2008, there was increasing worldwide awareness about global warming and the effects of carbon dioxide on our ozone layer. The over-production of consumer goods and intensive farming, which we were told would have a severe and far-reaching effect on our climate within the next fifty years, also came to our attention as serious problems. We were informed that unless we changed the way we produced and distributed our consumer goods and food that humans would implode as a species.