E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
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Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
#2Someone is gonna be rich
Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
#3Obligatory How It's Made on gold recycling from e-waste:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Sp6Qhe1i8Y&t=3s
Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
#4Interesting they mentioned Apple's Daisy. I feel that Apple gets an unfair amount of criticism for their lack of ewaste initiatives but none or very little is attributed to other smartphone OEMs like Samsung.
Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
#5This ship sailed. Its generally accepted that e-scrap processor's margins are 15% or less. Its not just the cost to access/buy the materials that keeps margins low. The CAPEX costs are enormous, there are large operating costs, and regulatory compliance is also very expensive. Further complicating matters is government flip-flopping on mandated electronic scrap collection regulations that make it tough for business to predict future returns on investment. Add to that the volatility of the commodities markets and its no easy task to make a profit these days in electronic scrap. Nobody is getting rich of e-scrap that doesn't already have a foot or other appendage in the game.
Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
#6Interesting they mentioned Apple's Daisy. I feel that Apple gets an unfair amount of criticism for their lack of ewaste initiatives but none or very little is attributed to other smartphone OEMs like Samsung.
Most of the attention stems from organizations like Greenpeace which tend to attack high profile targets in ways that are as much self serving as they are beneficial if not more so.
* Regarding Daisy, I'd be curious to hear how it handles damaged iPhones. Can it and to what degree? What percentage of iPhones can be recycled by it? I fear that any iPhone that's compromised won't be recycled out of concern for breaking the recycling machine.
Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
#7I would like to see more e-waste initiatives based in reuse instead of recycling. To me it seems like any advances on the recycling front are outpaced by throwaway tech culture and general overconsumption.
Seeing as processor speeds have pretty much plateaued [1], I wonder if it is useful to start thinking less in terms of precious metals and instead in potential processing power of e-waste. I remember a discussion on here about cheap web host providers using consumer grade boxes as servers. With today's cluster technologies, there's certainly creative applications for processing power that would end up in a landfill.
[1] https://www.maketecheasier.com/why-cpu-clock-speed-isnt-incr...
Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
#8When its time to upgrade the ewaste extracting robot, its child will mine their parents.
Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
#9Recycling individual components is profitable with sufficiently low wages. Here's Bunnie Huang talking about that: https://youtu.be/y5QkM2Work0?t=1464
You can make a reasonably good living in Shenzhen by reselling expensive chips from discarded hardware.
Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
#10I would like to see more e-waste initiatives based in reuse instead of recycling. To me it seems like any advances on the recycling front are outpaced by throwaway tech culture and general overconsumption. Seeing as processor speeds have pretty much plateaued [1], I wonder if it is useful to start thinking less in terms of precious metals and instead in potential processing power of e-waste. I remember a discussion o…
Power consumption is going down with each gen and is big cost driver. Also heat dissipation in data centers is costly. Gotta consider TCO in these cases.