Truly, Gold is Everywhere

Fang Bai finished his lunch and took a rickshaw to the Yaming Electronics Recycling Company.

It was a company specializing in the recycling and processing of electronic products, and it was fairly large in scale.

The electronic warehouse grounds covered about twenty to thirty mu of land, and quite a few buyers were already on-site, picking through the goods.

Fang Bai's target was imported TV e-waste. What came into view were mountains of broken-down old televisions, along with some that were still in decent condition.

The scavengers mainly collected useful TV components or units that could be repaired, then pieced them together, refurbished them, and sold them.

That was exactly what Fang Bai planned to do.

Most people back home couldn't understand why foreigners didn't want these things, and Fang Bai himself had found it hard to grasp before.

Didn't broken TVs have any value at all?

Thinking it over, it made sense. It wasn't like machinery, where even selling it as scrap metal could fetch a decent price.

But TVs were different. The cheap plastic shells and glass made up most of the weight. The only valuable parts were the wires and deflection coils, which contained copper wire about ten times more expensive than iron.

The amount of copper wire in a single TV wasn't much, and dismantling it was a hassle.

If this were a later-era solid waste recycling plant, the wires and deflection coils would be recovered directly, while the remaining glass, shells, and other parts would be crushed into granules, sorted through professional separation and screening methods, and sold by category.

Phosphor powder, electron guns, circuit boards, and the like would undergo further refining to extract rare earths, copper, gold, silver, and other metals.

But the solid waste recycling plants of this era used crude methods. Lacking specialized repair and inspection personnel and with low technical skill, they couldn't do the kind of professional sorting seen later. They usually just crushed everything together without classification for refining. Only TV parts in relatively good condition were picked out for refurbishing customers to choose from.

If it wasn't a solid waste recycling plant, the typical secondhand TV dealer was mainly after the copper in the deflection coils, wires, and transformers. The other parts had little recycling value, or the cost of recycling them was too high.

In developed countries, labor costs were high, and ordinary families wouldn't bother dismantling coils and wires that weren't worth much to them. Unused or outdated TVs were simply thrown away as trash.

When Chinese people spotted this market, some began specializing in collecting this e-waste. As long as they paid the shipping to get it to China, it was essentially a no-cost business.

So, unsorted TVs and circuit boards were sold by the ton.

At the time, TVs were hot-selling items with long lifespans. Most families bought one and didn't replace it for years, treating it like a family heirloom.

Brands like Panda, Feiyue, and Konka—domestic 14-inch black-and-white TVs—sold new for two to three hundred yuan. Imported brands like Toshiba, Sony, and Panasonic cost double that.

A few years earlier, domestic 14-inch black-and-white TVs had sold for three to four hundred yuan, but prices had dropped quickly.

As for new color TVs, an imported 29-inch Sony cost over ten thousand yuan, and a 21-inch one was still four to five thousand.

CRT color TVs were the mainstream type at the time, using cathode ray tube technology with concave glass screens.

Domestic color TVs were rare back then, with poor picture quality and small sizes. Even so, supply couldn't keep up with demand.

Households in those days had no mortgages or car loans, and there were few goods to buy. Most of a family's income went toward improving their lives. A few-thousand-yuan TV or a ten-thousand-yuan motorcycle—they'd buy them on a whim.

People in later eras would find it hard to understand why a Ten Thousand Yuan Household would spend thousands on a color TV. Wouldn't it be better to start a business or buy a house?

If you didn't know about future housing prices, didn't know electronics would become worthless, didn't know currency would depreciate so fast, didn't know... then it made sense.

Money just sat there with nowhere to spend it. What else could you do?

Right?

In later times, there were endless products on the shelves—spicy crawfish feasts, a few hundred yuan to cuddle a princess at a KTV, cars and houses, nonstop online shopping, and those frustrating bride prices. Plenty of ways to spend money.

But right now, if Fang Bai wanted to have some fun, just finding a ride was a hassle. Transportation was inconvenient, there was no internet, and the best entertainment was staying home to watch TV.

Every night, villagers would grab flashlights and go door-to-door to watch TV at other people's houses. It was a common sight in the countryside.

So, watching TV was an indispensable part of people's lives and the main medium for getting information from the outside world.

Fang Bai pulled his thoughts back and walked into the TV sorting area. Like the other customers, he could browse freely. Some bosses had their people move selected TVs to an empty zone, where they'd be weighed and priced later.

Black-and-white TVs in decent condition, regardless of size or brand, cost 700 to 900 yuan per ton. A 14-inch black-and-white TV weighed about 10 to 12 kilograms, so for a thousand yuan, you could buy around a hundred units.

Color TVs were pricier. Those in good shape cost 2,500 yuan per ton, with sizes mainly 21 inches, a few 14 and 29 inches, and very few larger ones. The biggest available on the market at the time was 34 inches.

These prices for good-condition TVs were too steep for most refurbishing bosses, and they required a lot of time to diagnose problems. The technical demands were too high, so they generally didn't go for these.

TVs in poor condition were much cheaper, along with intact parts that had been stripped out. Those were the real targets for the scavengers.

If someone from a later era saw these secondhand TVs, they'd never believe it: "Can't these just be fixed?"

Why hadn't anyone else figured this out?

Was Fang Bai the only one destined to get rich?

Were there that many fools just watching gold lie on the ground?

It wasn't that easy.

First, there was the information gap. Hardly anyone knew about e-waste.

Not just in this era—without phones or media, how many people would know about electronic e-waste? Or that it existed in T City?

Even if they did, it was sold by the ton. You needed capital to buy it in bulk; they wouldn't sell in small lots.

How much savings did private individuals have back then?

Second, it seemed simple, but repairing it was tough. You had to find where the fault was.

The good secondhand TVs were naturally picked up by Yaming Company or sold at high prices to refurbishing firms.

What was left on-site were the hard-to-fix ones. That was how Fang Bai could find bargains.

This is not something a simple electrician could handle.

If it were an electrician from a later era, well-traveled and knowledgeable, they might be able to fix it.

In this day and age, skilled people are all in state-run units; few think about electronic e-waste, and there aren't that many technicians to begin with.

So, this era is a goldmine—relatively easy to strike it rich.

Also, if a TV is made exclusively for the Island Nation, the voltage is 110V, and it needs a step-down transformer. If it's for export, it's usually 220V, which can be used directly in Huaguo.

Fang Bai placed his hand on a 21-inch Toshiba color TV made in 1988 and found that the picture tube and screen were fine. The damaged parts included two bulging capacitors on the circuit board, a broken speaker, and a break in the degaussing coil.

If you know what's broken, repairing it isn't difficult.

Fang Bai only needed to hire someone with a basic understanding of circuits, mark the problem areas for repair, and it wouldn't take much time to fix. Then he could refurbish the TV.

An imported color TV originally selling for around four thousand yuan—couldn't it sell for a thousand, or even a few hundred?

As for costs?

It weighs about 20 kilograms, and the purchase price is around fifty yuan.

Factoring in transportation, labor for repairs, new parts, refurbishing, and sales costs, it probably comes to about a hundred yuan.

Several times the profit!

Damn, that's insane!

Of course, the goods are right here, but you need the know-how to work in this field.

If you've got the skills, it's like picking up money. In this era, there are that many opportunities to get rich.

But most people don't have the skills, and they don't know about this information.

So, calling it a monopoly isn't far off.

"It really is a goldmine everywhere—it just depends on whether you have the ability to scoop it up."

Fang Bai thought to himself, thrilled. Finding an easy-to-fix TV was too simple.

Others couldn't do it, but he could do it effortlessly!

He'd read plenty of fantasy novels where a group discovers a treasure map, but the most valuable loot always ends up in the protagonist's hands.

Now, Fang Bai was just like the protagonist in those novels. This e-waste dump of TVs seemed like a treasure map tailor-made for him!

He wasn't afraid of others taking too much, because this kind of treasure kept flowing in from abroad.

The domestic TV market was huge—supply couldn't keep up with demand!

This was way too damn satisfying!

This kind of satisfaction was different from the feeling of making a lot of money the usual way.

It was easy, free, and without fierce competition.

It was pure fun.