California makes almost every big diesel truck pass an emissions test twice a year, and soon four times. Fleets hate losing a truck for a morning, so a tester with a small reader and a laptop drives to the yard instead. The kit costs about $1,429 and each test pays $75 or more.

Every office has a closet of dead laptops nobody will dumpster, because the data is a liability and the state may not let you landfill them. One man bought rain-soaked servers at a yard sale, taught himself teardown off YouTube, and turned county drop-off contracts into a moat.

A distribution center receives thousands of pallets it did not order and cannot store, and the docks fill up. The manager wants empty dock space by Friday and wants somebody else deciding which boards are salvageable. The clever part is what happens to the wood that fails.