As other people already said, extracting metals from old electronics has been a thing for a long time. I don't know about gold/cooper/etc, but I met a guy that was extracting galium arsenide from circuit boards, last I heard he was opening a large plant in China. AFAIK it is (was?) actually pretty difficult to pull that off, so he's one of the few people who do that.
E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
71–80 of 84 posts
Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
#72I 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…
I can offer a little insight. One of the companies I work for buys salvage/returned merchandise (mostly electronics, computers and related devices, office furniture, appliances, etc). We go through the items sorting out what is worth reselling as is, what requires further inspection and repair, and obvious junk beyond repair. The items requiring inspection and/or repair go to me, and about half of what I look at is considered "open box" or "damaged box", gets a cursory inspection, is run though the paces and checked for functionality, and sent on to the people who list it on various online marketplaces. About a fourth of the remaining items sent to me are repairable, which I do and send on to the sellers listed as "seller refurbished". The remaining portion is sent to the junk pile if I can't repair it or if it's missing too many parts to be worth selling. I will sometimes hold back a valuable part (power supply, special cable, etc) from an unsellable part to use for a similar item in the future.
From the junk pile, we sell by weight to recyclers who either break the items down into recyclable parts themselves, or sell them on to firms that handle what they can't, including extracting rare metals from circuit boards. To my knowledge, such firms are based here in the US, but I don't know enough about that side of the chain to name any.
Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This was true in 1995, assuming you can spend unlimited time writing your code. You can almost certainly get an order of magnitude better performance with a custom backend written in a low-level language instead of a SQL database. And, I don't know if you've ever used a SQL database written in Python instead of C, but I have, and it's definitely a lot slower. But it's not true today, because today hand-tuned assembly…
> And, I don't know if you've ever used a SQL database written in Python instead of C, but I have, and it's definitely a lot slower.
I don't doubt that but on today's web stacks you use either MySQL or Postgres typically and both those are written in C.
Yes, you can create your own DB written in a low level language, but you'll be hitting the same issues that the DB solves for you (indexing upon insertions, query optimizations, transactional operations, etc).
Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
#74Earlier 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…
Believe it or not but 1USD per hour is not poor country. Poor country be like 1 USD per day.
Due to inflation is not possible to live on 1 USD per day anymore as the cost of food alone is higher than this.
Even in the poorest countries labour costs are at a minimium of 1 USD an hour.
Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
#75When 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 ther…
How do you learn to do this? I am a CS grad(Bachelors) and I got my first computer and started programming when I turned 19. Before then I used to just browse the web.
What should I focus on to get more hands-on the hardware part?
Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Believe it or not but 1USD per hour is not poor country. Poor country be like 1 USD per day.
Due to inflation is not possible to live on 1 USD per day anymore as the cost of food alone is higher than this. Even in the poorest countries labour costs are at a minimium of 1 USD an hour.
It is certainly possible to meet all of one's nutritional requirements on 1 USD per day of food, especially if you have a chicken to provide eggs.
If working 48 hour weeks, 1 USD per hour is $208 per month, which is a modestly good wage in some places. Not really the minimum, although probably so for a very dirty and unpleasant job in a recycling factory.
Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
#77I 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?
Those 486 towers with turbo buttons are going for >$500 these days. Seriously search ebay for a 486 and you'll see the crazy prices they are getting.
Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
#78When 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 ther…
How do you learn to do this? I am a CS grad(Bachelors) and I got my first computer and started programming when I turned 19. Before then I used to just browse the web. What should I focus on to get more hands-on the hardware part?
I just taught myself, using what was then PBFixit, and is now iFixit. When it's already broken, you can be more confident about trying to take it apart - it can't get worse!
Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
#79If it's a good business it can't be "good for the planet".
Not just because it's the absence of business that is good for the planet (absolutely speaking), but also because it being a business just means to encourage more e-waste (for it to be mined). Plus all the externalities.
It's just another case of "we screw the planet badly, but we put some plastics in special recycling bins, so that's ok".
Re: E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Believe it or not but 1USD per hour is not poor country. Poor country be like 1 USD per day.
Due to inflation is not possible to live on 1 USD per day anymore as the cost of food alone is higher than this. Even in the poorest countries labour costs are at a minimium of 1 USD an hour.
You'd be surprised:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_count...