Do small businesses tend to handle their own Ewaste ( I suppose it depends on size right?) Am I jumping into a crowded market?
I have experience in this field running a small business inside of a non profit. We dealt we Government/large business Ewaste and some customer donations. My focus would be on smaller businesses and it’s not something I’ve looked into.
IMO it’s not profitable on its own. Most communities have places that take ewaste for free and for every 25 items you pick up only 1 is usually worth actually recycling. When I worked in IT we offered data destruction and recycling services for free to our contract clients. The average residential client throw away their devices rather than spend time and money to recycle them properly. Data recovery for residential clients is a much more profitable adventure and offering to recycle the device for free afterwards is a plus.
There is, but it will be a very very slow start to grow. Most document destruction companies handle this already, and there are are many of them out there (https://directory.isigmaonline.org/). The E-waste removal is usually provided for free because they are paying for the document/data destruction services.