Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 84 posts

Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet

#51

Post by walrus01 »

netman21 wrote: post #41

I am in the e-waste industry. There are thousands of companies doing this already. This article is written like the BBC just discovered this. While there are many small processors there are also big ones like Arrow Electronics. The hottest item is phones. There is a small shop down the road from me that processes 300K phones a month. They are not capital intensive but are very labor intensive. Most of the money is in…

Serious question, once the things that still work have been repaired, resold, or dismantled for parts to repair other things. Is there ANY way that with north American labor costs and insurance, OSHA standards, pollution regulations, energy costs etc, that it's economical to start melting down printed circuit boards for metal recovery?

Because either I am guessing this article is delusional, or they're completely ignoring the part where the dirty messy work gets done by people in a poor country for $1/hour wages.

Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet

#52

Post by Retra »

tajen wrote: post #37
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>people don't throw out technology until it's obsolete People throw out computers (including screens and everything) because the mouse stopped working, or the power supply needs replacing or the computer got a virus. A washing machine needs a new door-seal, a cooker needs a new light, people actually throw out that sort of stuff. Ebay has helped to make a market for junk, but oftentimes it seems people over-estimate…

« A door seal’s gonna cost as much as a new machine sir. » Every repairman. It’s a difficult economic issue. Suitably skilled repairmen only exist medium economies, where we produce enough income to teach youngsters soldering, but when the economy is not developed as much as to have marketers take the power over the makers (think Juicero). In the Western economy today, repairmen are more salesmen on the field than ac…

That's really just economy of scale at work, right? Shipping one repair man to a single location is less efficient than shipping ten thousand units from a factory to a distribution center. Servicing all of your customers (new and old) with the same mechanism is more efficient than having different mechanisms for new (sales & delivery) and old (repair).

Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet

#53

Post by azernik »

walrus01 wrote: post #51
netman21 wrote: post #41

I am in the e-waste industry. There are thousands of companies doing this already. This article is written like the BBC just discovered this. While there are many small processors there are also big ones like Arrow Electronics. The hottest item is phones. There is a small shop down the road from me that processes 300K phones a month. They are not capital intensive but are very labor intensive. Most of the money is in…

Serious question, once the things that still work have been repaired, resold, or dismantled for parts to repair other things. Is there ANY way that with north American labor costs and insurance, OSHA standards, pollution regulations, energy costs etc, that it's economical to start melting down printed circuit boards for metal recovery? Because either I am guessing this article is delusional, or they're completely ign…

The article mentions a mostly-automated setup - which is why it focuses on metal recycling, which is probably easier to automate than component reuse.

Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet

#54

Post by throwaway31246 »

rolleiflex wrote: post #13
fuball63 wrote: post #7

I 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…

There is a Vancouver-based non-profit called FreeGeek ( https://www.freegeekvancouver.org/ ) that takes in e-waste, salvages usable parts and sells them back to fund their tech-education efforts. I'm surprised that this does not exist in Silicon Valley, it most certainly should. Edit: fixed the link

Freegeek is a franchise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Geek There is another in Chicago that is pretty awesome.

Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet

#55

Post by kwiens »

walrus01 wrote: post #51
netman21 wrote: post #41

I am in the e-waste industry. There are thousands of companies doing this already. This article is written like the BBC just discovered this. While there are many small processors there are also big ones like Arrow Electronics. The hottest item is phones. There is a small shop down the road from me that processes 300K phones a month. They are not capital intensive but are very labor intensive. Most of the money is in…

Serious question, once the things that still work have been repaired, resold, or dismantled for parts to repair other things. Is there ANY way that with north American labor costs and insurance, OSHA standards, pollution regulations, energy costs etc, that it's economical to start melting down printed circuit boards for metal recovery? Because either I am guessing this article is delusional, or they're completely ign…

Nope, the items with negative value cause significant problems. CRT displays are the largest design problem that recyclers are working their way through.

Just this week, ECS Refining, Apple's main recycler in California, shut down. All of their unprocessed material is now the responsibility of their landlord. https://resource-recycling.com/e-scrap/2018/07/03/ecs-refini...

Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet

#56

Post by walrus01 »

kwiens wrote: post #55
walrus01 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question, once the things that still work have been repaired, resold, or dismantled for parts to repair other things. Is there ANY way that with north American labor costs and insurance, OSHA standards, pollution regulations, energy costs etc, that it's economical to start melting down printed circuit boards for metal recovery? Because either I am guessing this article is delusional, or they're completely ign…

Nope, the items with negative value cause significant problems. CRT displays are the largest design problem that recyclers are working their way through. Just this week, ECS Refining, Apple's main recycler in California, shut down. All of their unprocessed material is now the responsibility of their landlord. https://resource-recycling.com/e-scrap/2018/07/03/ecs-refini...

I remember seeing this a few years ago:

https://theintercept.com/2016/05/10/gps-tracking-devices-cat...

http://www.ban.org/trash-transparency/

Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet

#57

Post by guywithaphone »

walrus01 wrote: post #51
netman21 wrote: post #41

I am in the e-waste industry. There are thousands of companies doing this already. This article is written like the BBC just discovered this. While there are many small processors there are also big ones like Arrow Electronics. The hottest item is phones. There is a small shop down the road from me that processes 300K phones a month. They are not capital intensive but are very labor intensive. Most of the money is in…

Serious question, once the things that still work have been repaired, resold, or dismantled for parts to repair other things. Is there ANY way that with north American labor costs and insurance, OSHA standards, pollution regulations, energy costs etc, that it's economical to start melting down printed circuit boards for metal recovery? Because either I am guessing this article is delusional, or they're completely ign…

if you're going into business for recycling or refurbishing, you're probably not taking a shotgun approach and doing everything. Specialisation is key. Is your focus on gathering electronics, refurbishing, refining metals, being a middle man, etc.

Yes, there are lots of people who legally refine precious metals from electronics and make a living. There are also lots of people who are middlemen and sell it to others.

High value metals like gold are refined by LOTS of companies.

"Mining " gold from dumps could be very productive because the concentration is MUCH higher in electronics than in the most productive gold mine. Profitable Gold mines typically mine and process an average of more than 2000-4000 pound of ore to obtain one ounce of gold!

It is much more environmentally conscious (In some instances more profitable) to recycle electronics than to mine for precious metals.

Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet

#58

Post by guywithaphone »

alkonaut wrote: post #23

I have left computers for dissassembly and recycling since they had a “turbo” button on them. I don’t know where else to dispose them, it’s not like I could leave one in my trash bin. Metal bin?

Metal recyclers are in every major and many minor cities. EBay also has a thriving gold recycling community. Search "Gold scrap"

Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet

#59

Post by peterburkimsher »

When I was 8, my dad gave me a broken Mac Plus. He said that if I could fix it, it would be mine! So I did. Later, when I was 15, I bought, fixed, and re-sold a class set of 20 iBooks.

http://peterburk.github.io/blog/#iBookRepair

Then I went off to university and studied Electronic Systems Engineering. But for the last 7 years, I've had work experience in software. I still regularly fix computers for friends.

If there are tech recycling companies in NZ/Australia/Canada that are hiring, I'd be so excited to do this full-time. If I got another job in Vancouver, I'd volunteer with FreeGeek, just because I enjoy it so much. I wish I could get paid to do my hobby though.

Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet

#60

Post by pcwalton »

bb88 wrote: post #42
kragen wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is almost completely wrong, because Dennard scaling ended around 2002. Power consumption in mainstream CPUs has been a few picojoules per instruction since the Pentium. Even the MSP430 is almost a pJ/insn. Modern ultra-low-power CPUs like the STM32L reach down below 0.3 pJ/insn, as did the LPC1110 a decade ago. Its more mainstream STM32F siblings are still stuck at 1.5 pJ/insn. Research CPUs using exotic logic f…

From that argument, we should be coding everything in hand tuned assembly, because hand tuned assembly gives a 10% to 200% speedup over C. The number one slowdown I've seen in rendering web pages, were not bad algorithms or bad programming languages, but bad database queries. And if that's the case, there is a lot more optimization in the DB to be gained than rewriting your back-end to C, say.

> From that argument, we should be coding everything in hand tuned assembly, because hand tuned assembly gives a 10% to 200% speedup over C.

Yes, all things equal, it's better to write faster CPU-bound code. In a world in which writing optimal machine code all the time was possible without sacrificing anything else important, then we would always want to do it. This is hardly a controversial conclusion.

The reason we don't write faster CPU-bound code is that, in the world we live in, all things are never equal. Correctness, security, maintainability, development velocity, portability, engineering culture/trends, and so on are usually more important than raw CPU performance.

Post reply on HN