Redditor scores $500 worth of DDR4 at local dump and now I'm wondering if every landfill is actually a goldmine
I've often been casually tempted to rifle through the jumble of electronic odds and sods at my local dump. But I've never actually done it. Now I'm thinking I probably should after a redditor on the PC Master Race sub reports scoring 64 GB of DDR4, a 10th Gen Intel i7 CPU, an Asus motherboard, NAS drive and more at a local refuse site.
Currently, you're looking at around $500 to buy that amount of generic DDR4 new, more if you want the fancy stuff. So, that's quite the find on the memory alone, let alone the other stuff.
To catalogue the full haul, it included, "a real nice Samsung monitor and a brand new 5.25 floppy drive among other things, but I also found a Drobo 5 bay NAS, 64 GB DDR4, a 10th Gen i7 with a Cooler Master Cooler, a decent little Asus motherboard and a few other odds and ends." Sheesh.
Apparently the redditor, who's handle isn't exactly safe for work, lives in a small unidentified town with a population of around 8,000 and has found the odd stick of DDR4 before but nothing on this scale. Inevitably, the discussion below the post includes numerous accounts of redditors finding surprisingly viable hardware at landfill sites.
One report details a friend working at a recycling depot who has notched up, "Radeon 6700 XT, RTX 4060, RTX 2060 Super, GTX 1050 Ti. Full PC working minus GPU and SSD with i9 9900K, Corsair 360 AIO, ROG Z390 32 GB DDR4 3200 RGB, 750 W Gold EVGA PSU. Also working PC minus SSD and RAM, AMD Asrock B550, 3700X CPU, GTX 1070 Ti, 650 W Gold Thermaltake PSU." Not bad.
Another reports scoring an RTX 2070 and 128 GB of DDR4 in "various" sticks, but all working. However, many redditors report that rummaging through the e-waste at their local recycling centres is not allowed, lamenting the likely thousands of dollars worth of hardware that will be simply "melted down".
Indeed, the OP of the Reddit thread in question reveals that digging through the e-waste at their dump isn't officially sanctioned. "It's not exactly allowed, but my town being as small as it is and not having cameras there like they're meant to helps a lot. Also have befriended the man who works there so I don't have to worry about being snitched on."
All of which means that scoring near-priceless memory from your local landfill probably isn't a goer. It's interesting to speculate whether the various service providers around the recycling industry have twigged to the value of this stuff and are rescuing memory for resale or repurposing rather than regular recycling. If that isn't already taking place, what with the way memory pricing is going, it'll surely be happening soon.