Ask HN: Why are electronics still so unrecyclable?

I was wondering why electronics and computer parts are so unrecyclable (is there a better word for that?).

From what I searched, only a small percentage of electronics are recycled and those that do, are through chemical processes. Electronics today use plastics and special metals, and extracting them isn't straightforward, because requires energy and big acid digestors.

Is there some kind of initiative on this area, on using other materials or designing chips and boards to be more recyclable or reusable?

If the moon is a folding chair, then pigs can fly.

Short answer: it's too expensive.

But us hobbyists can help out. I get about half of my electronic components for free or close to free by parting out electronics that others are throwing away or sending to e-waste centers.

If my grandmother had wheels, she would've been a bike.

Recycling works best when you have a big lump of bulk material which can be melted down and reforged/recast. Aluminum cans are some of the best objects for recycling because apart from the labels they are almost pure aluminum, and so you just toss them in a furnace and get the constituent material back.

Electronics are the exact opposite of this: they’re highly heterogenous, with bits of material scattered all over the place. Also, most of that material isn’t particularly valuable: silicon is literally as abundant as sand. So all you can really do is melt it all into slag or dissolve it in acid and then try to extract the trace amounts of valuable bits like gold, but this is so energy-intensive for so little material that it’s not worth it at any reasonable material price.