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Planet Money did a story [1] in 2020 about a US team running a very similar scheme with the same business model to get rid of R12 refrigerant in the Midwest. I

Planet Money did a story [1] in 2020 about a US team running a very similar scheme with the same business model to get rid of R12 refrigerant in the Midwest. It turns out running a business where you give people money in exchange for their junk is suprisingly harder than you would think. [1] https://www.npr.org/transcripts/917060248 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/917060248

_dark_matter_ 4y ago
Is it more feasible in less expensive countries? I'd imagine you could pay a tech in Indonesia considerably less than in the Midwest and they'd still consider it a good deal (assuming funding levels are comparable).
- bombcar 4y ago
  I suspect part of it is just lack of knowledge; if someone showed up at your front door offering you money for some random item in your garage you'd be tempted to politely decline; because if someone is going out of their way to offer you cash, it's probably worth more than they're offering.
- shalmanese 4y ago
  From the NPR story, it sounds like the business is ultimately constrained by customer acquisition costs and being in the US might actually be an advantage since the digital advertising market is more mature. In fact, now that OP has jogged my memory, I might start using this as an interview question for junior marketing people. If given a budget of $10K, how would you deliver me enough people willing to sell me 1000L of 10+ year old refrigerant? I bet the answers would be revealing and almost all wrong.
  - mh- 4y ago
    ok, what's the "right" answer?
    - shalmanese 4y ago
      Whatever answer the company mentioned in the article is using, assuming they're still successful.
      - verve_rat 4y ago
        So you are going to interview people and mark them down for the "wrong" answer when you don't even know the "right" answer? I hope you fire yourself soon, because you'd fail your own interview.
        shalmanese 4y ago
        You seem to not understand the point of an interview. It's not a quiz where you get a mark at the end and the best marks get the job. It's a series of intentionally constructed questions to help talk through someone's thinking and process in order to understand if they would be a good fit. The actual answer at the end is largely irrelevant. My point with saying "almost all wrong" is that this is one of the questions where you have like, 50 different ideas that seem like they could work and wouldn't work if tried when you try it and maybe 1 or 2 actual strategies, not a question where you have 30 different things that all work with different pros and cons and you need to compare between them.
        verve_rat 4y ago
        Oh I get it. That is why I used scare quotes. But you said yourself that you don't know what will work and what won't. You say that the answer at the end is largely irrelevant, but then claim that there is only a couple of good solutions in the problem space, implying that people that don't pick those good solutions will be rejected. Either your position is not coherent, or there is a communication deficit here.
        shalmanese 4y ago
        > implying that people that don't pick those good solutions will be rejected. No, you're implying that. Definitionally, I don't know the answer to the question. If I knew the answer, I wouldn't be interviewing you, I'd be off making millions buying R12. And if you knew the answer, you should be off making millions buying R12 instead of interviewing here. That's clear to everyone at the start of the interview. You seem to be attaching a moral valence to the word wrong, that people are somehow failures if they come up with the wrong answer to a question. The opposite is true, most of the things we try in life are wrong, we try something, it doesn't work, we learn from it and we try again. edit: The reason why I think it's a good interview question for marketing people is because it's a business that seems like, if the customer acquisition piece is figured out, the rest of the business is relatively trivial. But empirically, it's not a common business so the customer acq piece must be pretty hard to figure out. At the same time, it seems like there's at least a few businesses so it also doesn't seem like it's impossible to figure out. If I hire you, I'm going to constantly be asking you to do things that, as far as you're aware, you're the first person in the world to have ever done. If I'm asking you to do it, it means I don't know if it can be done or not, I don't know the "right" answer to the problem. Most of the time, the answer back is that the thing I want done looks impossible and probably isn't worth pursuing which is a great answer in the context of a job but not very illuminating in the context of an interview. This question looks that hard but there's also a proof point that it can be done which means you can't give a "this isn't possible" as an out and are forced to explore deeper into how someone could actually do it. At the same time, it's a question with relatively little context which means I can explain all the relevant facts in the span of an interview. That's why I think it's a potentially great interview question. It's not designed as a trick brainteaser for you to figure out the answer. It's designed for you to exercise the same parts of your brain as you would when I come to you with any other crazy request that probably can't be done.
- moralestapia 4y ago
  Whew, this has to be the weirdest instance of comparative advantage I've seen in the wild.
noneeeed 4y ago
If it’s the one I’m thinking of that episode made me so frustrated about a segment of the population. They had to lie about what they were doing because there were people who objected to the fact this was being done to protect the environment and would refuse to sell to them essentially to stick it to the environmentalists. The degree to which not screwing up the environment has become partisan for some people is really quite depressing.
- shalmanese 4y ago
  Yup, that's the one. Had that exact same feeling of frustration which is why the story is still fresh in my memory 2 years later.
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  My neighbor, whose political affiliation you can guess, actively gives us shit for recycling. It is a free service where we are, and I don't bother recycling the low-value plastic crap, primarily thick dry cardboard, glass and metal, and this dude still pokes fun at it every time he sees the bin. Just the dumbest damn people.
  - __alexs 4y ago
    Some plastics are worth something like 10x more than glass in the recycling market. I think PET is the big one.
    - skybrian 4y ago
      Interesting. Where could I read more about this?
  - vxNsr 4y ago
    Probably because in most of the US recycling is fake and it all ends up in the landfill anyway, or the amount of energy spent recycling outweighs the savings. Recycling is something the oil companies came up with to whitewash their image, and justify single use plastics, it doesn’t work, has never worked and it’s hard to see how it would work. This is the real “Inconvenient Truth.” If you really wanna “do your part to fight climate change,” you’re better off trying to live like someone out of 1890 before plastics was a thing, and people repaired/patched 100x before even considering replacements. You’ll have less time for arguing with idiots like me online but you’ll be much happier and actually be making a positive contribution.
fortran77 4y ago
And China will start manufacturing R12 and selling it, if the price paid for exchanging it is more than the manufacturing cost.
- elil17 4y ago
  Chinese companies have historically violated bans on making banned gasses, but other countries have detected this. After that, the Chinese government has actually cracked down on them and eliminated those emissions. They worked with international groups to find the violators and then raided and even demolished illegal factories: https://www.climatechangenews.com/2021/02/10/study-suggests-chinas-crackdown-illegal-cfc-gases-working/ https://www.climatechangenews.com/2021/02/10/study-suggests-...
  - foobiekr 4y ago
    China's policy of responding only when they are caught is broad and applies to a wide variety of violations. The problem is, they also make it very hard to police China. This is deliberate. The 1-2% that get caught and punished are acceptable breakage from the broader picture.
    - hinkley 4y ago
      Absolutely there is someone somewhere in China who has built an R-12 plant with a high end capture system for escaping volatiles and a weird ventilation system that gets past the satellite imaging.
    - elil17 4y ago
      The fact that levels have fallen dramatically since this operation shows that much more than 1-2% are being caught. Not trying to defend the Chinese government as a whole, but on GHGs specifically they are doing more than many other countries to curb emissions.
bluSCALE4 4y ago
My guess is they're missing large demographics, hispanics that scrap metal. I'd imagine if they took effort to do campaigns in Spanish, Polish and Chinese, they'd have a lot better luck.

_dark_matter_ 4y ago

Is it more feasible in less expensive countries? I'd imagine you could pay a tech in Indonesia considerably less than in the Midwest and they'd still consider it a good deal (assuming funding levels are comparable).

bombcar 4y ago
I suspect part of it is just lack of knowledge; if someone showed up at your front door offering you money for some random item in your garage you'd be tempted to politely decline; because if someone is going out of their way to offer you cash, it's probably worth more than they're offering.
shalmanese 4y ago
From the NPR story, it sounds like the business is ultimately constrained by customer acquisition costs and being in the US might actually be an advantage since the digital advertising market is more mature. In fact, now that OP has jogged my memory, I might start using this as an interview question for junior marketing people. If given a budget of $10K, how would you deliver me enough people willing to sell me 1000L of 10+ year old refrigerant? I bet the answers would be revealing and almost all wrong.
- mh- 4y ago
  ok, what's the "right" answer?
  - shalmanese 4y ago
    Whatever answer the company mentioned in the article is using, assuming they're still successful.
    - verve_rat 4y ago
      So you are going to interview people and mark them down for the "wrong" answer when you don't even know the "right" answer? I hope you fire yourself soon, because you'd fail your own interview.
      - shalmanese 4y ago
        You seem to not understand the point of an interview. It's not a quiz where you get a mark at the end and the best marks get the job. It's a series of intentionally constructed questions to help talk through someone's thinking and process in order to understand if they would be a good fit. The actual answer at the end is largely irrelevant. My point with saying "almost all wrong" is that this is one of the questions where you have like, 50 different ideas that seem like they could work and wouldn't work if tried when you try it and maybe 1 or 2 actual strategies, not a question where you have 30 different things that all work with different pros and cons and you need to compare between them.
        verve_rat 4y ago
        Oh I get it. That is why I used scare quotes. But you said yourself that you don't know what will work and what won't. You say that the answer at the end is largely irrelevant, but then claim that there is only a couple of good solutions in the problem space, implying that people that don't pick those good solutions will be rejected. Either your position is not coherent, or there is a communication deficit here.
        shalmanese 4y ago
        > implying that people that don't pick those good solutions will be rejected. No, you're implying that. Definitionally, I don't know the answer to the question. If I knew the answer, I wouldn't be interviewing you, I'd be off making millions buying R12. And if you knew the answer, you should be off making millions buying R12 instead of interviewing here. That's clear to everyone at the start of the interview. You seem to be attaching a moral valence to the word wrong, that people are somehow failures if they come up with the wrong answer to a question. The opposite is true, most of the things we try in life are wrong, we try something, it doesn't work, we learn from it and we try again. edit: The reason why I think it's a good interview question for marketing people is because it's a business that seems like, if the customer acquisition piece is figured out, the rest of the business is relatively trivial. But empirically, it's not a common business so the customer acq piece must be pretty hard to figure out. At the same time, it seems like there's at least a few businesses so it also doesn't seem like it's impossible to figure out. If I hire you, I'm going to constantly be asking you to do things that, as far as you're aware, you're the first person in the world to have ever done. If I'm asking you to do it, it means I don't know if it can be done or not, I don't know the "right" answer to the problem. Most of the time, the answer back is that the thing I want done looks impossible and probably isn't worth pursuing which is a great answer in the context of a job but not very illuminating in the context of an interview. This question looks that hard but there's also a proof point that it can be done which means you can't give a "this isn't possible" as an out and are forced to explore deeper into how someone could actually do it. At the same time, it's a question with relatively little context which means I can explain all the relevant facts in the span of an interview. That's why I think it's a potentially great interview question. It's not designed as a trick brainteaser for you to figure out the answer. It's designed for you to exercise the same parts of your brain as you would when I come to you with any other crazy request that probably can't be done.
moralestapia 4y ago
Whew, this has to be the weirdest instance of comparative advantage I've seen in the wild.

noneeeed 4y ago

If it’s the one I’m thinking of that episode made me so frustrated about a segment of the population. They had to lie about what they were doing because there were people who objected to the fact this was being done to protect the environment and would refuse to sell to them essentially to stick it to the environmentalists. The degree to which not screwing up the environment has become partisan for some people is really quite depressing.

shalmanese 4y ago
Yup, that's the one. Had that exact same feeling of frustration which is why the story is still fresh in my memory 2 years later.
mikeyouse 4y ago
My neighbor, whose political affiliation you can guess, actively gives us shit for recycling. It is a free service where we are, and I don't bother recycling the low-value plastic crap, primarily thick dry cardboard, glass and metal, and this dude still pokes fun at it every time he sees the bin. Just the dumbest damn people.
- __alexs 4y ago
  Some plastics are worth something like 10x more than glass in the recycling market. I think PET is the big one.
  - skybrian 4y ago
    Interesting. Where could I read more about this?
- vxNsr 4y ago
  Probably because in most of the US recycling is fake and it all ends up in the landfill anyway, or the amount of energy spent recycling outweighs the savings. Recycling is something the oil companies came up with to whitewash their image, and justify single use plastics, it doesn’t work, has never worked and it’s hard to see how it would work. This is the real “Inconvenient Truth.” If you really wanna “do your part to fight climate change,” you’re better off trying to live like someone out of 1890 before plastics was a thing, and people repaired/patched 100x before even considering replacements. You’ll have less time for arguing with idiots like me online but you’ll be much happier and actually be making a positive contribution.

fortran77 4y ago

And China will start manufacturing R12 and selling it, if the price paid for exchanging it is more than the manufacturing cost.

elil17 4y ago
Chinese companies have historically violated bans on making banned gasses, but other countries have detected this. After that, the Chinese government has actually cracked down on them and eliminated those emissions. They worked with international groups to find the violators and then raided and even demolished illegal factories: https://www.climatechangenews.com/2021/02/10/study-suggests-chinas-crackdown-illegal-cfc-gases-working/ https://www.climatechangenews.com/2021/02/10/study-suggests-...
- foobiekr 4y ago
  China's policy of responding only when they are caught is broad and applies to a wide variety of violations. The problem is, they also make it very hard to police China. This is deliberate. The 1-2% that get caught and punished are acceptable breakage from the broader picture.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    Absolutely there is someone somewhere in China who has built an R-12 plant with a high end capture system for escaping volatiles and a weird ventilation system that gets past the satellite imaging.
  - elil17 4y ago
    The fact that levels have fallen dramatically since this operation shows that much more than 1-2% are being caught. Not trying to defend the Chinese government as a whole, but on GHGs specifically they are doing more than many other countries to curb emissions.

bluSCALE4 4y ago

My guess is they're missing large demographics, hispanics that scrap metal. I'd imagine if they took effort to do campaigns in Spanish, Polish and Chinese, they'd have a lot better luck.