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Ask HN: Why are electronics still so unrecyclable?

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Re: Ask HN: Why are electronics still so unrecyclable?

#71

Post by kube-system »

lgleason wrote: post #20

Repairability would help as well. Many times the only viable option to fix something is to swap a board, or replace the entire item, instead of replacing the one failed component that caused the board to fail, or reflowing the board etc.. Many components also do not offer batteries that can be replaced, such as the magic mouse, so you end up needing to replace the entire item. It's interesting how as certain things a…

I'm all for repairability, but as labor costs go up and manufacturing costs go down, the window for which there is incentive to repair narrows.

e.g. there's no amount of repairability design that you could apply to a $3 light bulb which would encourage people to pay someone western wages to repair. I think we're better off lobbying for better standards to communicate the quality of a bulb's design. The whole reason we have crappy LED bulbs to begin with is because the $3 overdriven bulb with crap components jammed into a tiny enclosure looks like a better deal on the shelf than a bulky $20 bulb with a large heat sink and lower output.

And the labor required to do component level repair is wildly expensive and limited (YouTubers who do it on principle notwithstanding), even further narrowing that window.

Re: Ask HN: Why are electronics still so unrecyclable?

#72

Post by duped »

lefra wrote: post #46
lgleason wrote: post #20

Repairability would help as well. Many times the only viable option to fix something is to swap a board, or replace the entire item, instead of replacing the one failed component that caused the board to fail, or reflowing the board etc.. Many components also do not offer batteries that can be replaced, such as the magic mouse, so you end up needing to replace the entire item. It's interesting how as certain things a…

Changing the PCB for a known-good one: $10 + maybe half an hour of low-skill work. Changing the failing component: maybe a few minutes, probably a few hours of an electronics engineer that's familiar with the design (plus his expensive tools). He's probably bad at soldering, so you'll need someone else to do that. Then you need to revalidate the board. It almost never make economical sense to try to repair the board.

The fact that we tolerate creating waste because it's "economical" is frankly disgusting. The disposal fees for e waste should make it uneconomical to dispose of boards.

Also training techs to repair SMD parts is really easy and cheap, you're grossly overestimating the costs. The real waste comes from boards with designs that can't be repaired so we tolerate a certain yield. For many small devices the yields are shockingly low.

The other thing is that yields are low because of bad designs. If it became uneconomical for you to throw half your boards out then designers would fix their crappy boards with tombstoned jellybean parts because they used shitty footprint libraries. This is a solvable engineering problem and it's gross that it's cheaper to throw shit into a landfill instead of fixing it.

Re: Ask HN: Why are electronics still so unrecyclable?

#73

Post by jltsiren »

benhill70 wrote: post #63
jltsiren wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the "reduce, reuse, recycle" slogan misleading. Everything that is manufactured will eventually become waste that must be disposed of responsibly. The overall volume of manufacturing only goes up if we leave it to the market, and there is no serious political will to legislate it down. That leaves us with an ever-increasing volume of waste that must be dealt with, making waste management an increasingly import…

I think you are forgetting about time. If the rate of stuff needing to get recycle is lower, then there is more time to recycle. If there the rate is too high then the facilities are overwhelmed and resort to less optimal strategies. This is why reduce and reuse are important.

It's misleading because it focuses on actions that are clearly not working. People on the average are increasing their consumption, not reducing it. That means the actual problem — the waste at the end of the pipeline — is growing every year.

Waste management is the actual problem that needs to be solved. "Reduce and reuse" can be a part of the solution, but people are not doing enough voluntarily to make it a major part.

Re: Ask HN: Why are electronics still so unrecyclable?

#74

Post by tonymet »

The concept of Recycling ( nearly all the materials can be reused with little cost or impact) is a myth. There are relatively few consumer products or materials that are readily recycled.

It's not so much that electronics are unrecyclable, it's that nearly everything is unrecyclable.

Recycling is nearly a fantasy. For the most part it has been a campaign for waste management firms to charge customers double while demanding they separate their own garbage, and punish them for doing it wrong. The charade lasted so long because much of the "recycling" was dumped in Asia and ended up in the ocean from there.

Re: Ask HN: Why are electronics still so unrecyclable?

#75

Post by tonymet »

randusername wrote: post #57

I like how threads like this are like a reverse nesting doll. Somebody says the problem is the specific metals, then someone says it is recovery processes, then market forces, then legislation, and I think I spied a comment on thermodynamics. I will take a shot in the dark somewhere in the middle. Intellectual property. As long as transparency and standardization are disincentivized it will be pretty hard to orchestr…

tear apart even the most primitive device with a plastic shell, lcd , pcb and power supply . None of those separate components are easily "recycled" .

The concept that materials are Recyclable by default is just a myth. It's very hard to turn waste into a refined and usable input material to produce another quality product that meets consumer expectations.

Re: Ask HN: Why are electronics still so unrecyclable?

#78

Post by kube-system »

duped wrote: post #72
lefra wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Changing the PCB for a known-good one: $10 + maybe half an hour of low-skill work. Changing the failing component: maybe a few minutes, probably a few hours of an electronics engineer that's familiar with the design (plus his expensive tools). He's probably bad at soldering, so you'll need someone else to do that. Then you need to revalidate the board. It almost never make economical sense to try to repair the board.

The fact that we tolerate creating waste because it's "economical" is frankly disgusting. The disposal fees for e waste should make it uneconomical to dispose of boards. Also training techs to repair SMD parts is really easy and cheap, you're grossly overestimating the costs. The real waste comes from boards with designs that can't be repaired so we tolerate a certain yield. For many small devices the yields are shoc…

> The fact that we tolerate creating waste because it's "economical" is frankly disgusting.

I don't think anyone here is suggesting we "tolerate" it, but describing the economic incentives that exist.

> The disposal fees for e waste should make it uneconomical to dispose of boards.

I can't think of any number that you could pick that wouldn't either be ineffective, or cause unintended effects. At $10, that's a drop in the bucket compared to labor costs of component level repair. At $100, you're going to see the local lake filled with obsolete cell phones, which is even worse than them being in a landfill.

Re: Ask HN: Why are electronics still so unrecyclable?

#79

Post by poyu »

MadVikingGod wrote: post #69

The ultimate reason is there isn't economic reason so. It cost's a lot to recycle anything, and most electronics would net you almost nothing valuable. Let's look at an example. Let's say your phones main board, which will net a few hundred grams of raw materials. First thing by weight the actual board itself is probably the biggest, if you could perfectly decompose it to it's parts you would have some fiberglass, gl…

> opportunity to take the bulk components off boards, test and sort them, and sell them in bulk.

I think this is already happening in China for certain components.

Re: Ask HN: Why are electronics still so unrecyclable?

#80

Post by 6510 »

refulgentis wrote: post #60
jltsiren wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the "reduce, reuse, recycle" slogan misleading. Everything that is manufactured will eventually become waste that must be disposed of responsibly. The overall volume of manufacturing only goes up if we leave it to the market, and there is no serious political will to legislate it down. That leaves us with an ever-increasing volume of waste that must be dealt with, making waste management an increasingly import…

So the idea of reducing consumption is misleading, the real solution is to reduce consumption (via the law forcing quotas on manufacturers and rationing on consumers)

Durability also cuts consumption. One can make the parts that break easy to replace and/or learn to do it at scale.
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