I’ve been kicked out of local junkyards ½ dozen times or so now. It’s a tricky game of trying to reach the waste pile when no one is looking, and also seeing who is on duty in hopes of at least ensuring that the same person doesn’t experience the pattern of kicking you out multiple times. Perhaps they would get aggressive and even block you from dumping stuff if you’re kicked out too much.
Strictly speaking, it’s theft to take stuff from the junkyard. To be clear, the junkyards in my area do not sell parts. They just melt and refine the waste. The melt value is naturally less than the as-is value to someone who would repair or reuse.
IMO, the #rightToRepair movement needs to expand to give the public access to junk before it’s recycled or dumped into landfills.
Some household waste places over here have a good workaround. They put aside obvious reusable, or otherwise interesting scrap. If you want it, you can have it (generally for a small donation to their beer fund).
It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot better than nothing, and avoids the safety/liability issues.
It’s a good start but they really cannot anticipate what will be useful to people. They wouldn’t have obscure knowledge like really old hard drives still have a really strong magnet inside (which is useful for fishing in bodies of water for more junk :)). They would just say “surely no one wants this 2gb hard drive”…
Appliances and electronics in my area go to a non-profit who repairs them and distributes them to 2nd hand shops around town. In principle that’s quite good but I’ve seen them operate. A bulk of the stuff they get goes straight to a pile where it will be broken down and material melted. It would be nice if that pile of stuff they think is not worth repairing were freely accessible to the public.
Unfortunately, we are the exception, rather than the rule. If they hung on to HDDs they would likely only move a few. Most of those would later be met by complaints that it wouldn’t work in their computer, or lost data. Similar problems apply to most other goods.
As for the second point. It’s a balance, since you’d end up with someone injuring themselves on some sheet metal one day, and someone taking the lot to weigh in another.
I help out with a charity, and we get a LOT of junk. While we try and reuse what we can, we do dispose of a lot, just because there’s too much of it to store away till it’s needed.
I think my ideal world would have some kind of cataloguing stage where items are posted to solarpunk eBay. Perhaps they’re dropped off at local collection points and landfill swap shops, workers sort them and identify their condition (or maybe people provide some of that info when they drop their stuff off?). Perhaps some stuff that can’t be used locally is transported to regional distribution centers. People are able to search that catalog, place orders, and maybe have stuff shipped to those collection centers for pickup. Maybe combine the distribution centers with in-house workshops, or maybe private repair co-ops there’d could take in broken stuff as stock. Hopefully a strong culture of offering stuff up Buy Nothing -style would take some of the strain off that industry, but I could see almost any stage of that being pretty fulfilling work honestly