Amazing way Chinese recycle millions of cellphones every year
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Re: Amazing way Chinese recycle millions of cellphones every year
#2It's a shame that most e-waste recycling in China is not as clean and neat as this. Case in point, the town of Guiyu:
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1870162_182214... http://www.viceland.com/int/v14n9/htdocs/ctrl.php#
(Don't get me wrong, responsible e-waste recycling is to be lauded and encouraged - it's all the more important because of places like Guiyu. I'm not too surprised Nokia choose to focus on one angle while not really mentioning the other one, though.)
Re: Amazing way Chinese recycle millions of cellphones every year
#3This is fantastic. Disassembled all the way down to the capacitors... If these parts are resold and reused, I don't think anyone could hope for better, short of a way to decompose and reuse PCB, or at the very least harvest the copper.
Re: Amazing way Chinese recycle millions of cellphones every year
#4It's a shame that most e-waste recycling in China is not as clean and neat as this. Case in point, the town of Guiyu: http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1870162_182214... http://www.viceland.com/int/v14n9/htdocs/ctrl.php# (Don't get me wrong, responsible e-waste recycling is to be lauded and encouraged - it's all the more important because of places like Guiyu. I'm not too surprised Nokia choose to focus o…
most e-waste recycling in China is not as clean and neat as this
Now I come to think about it, the original blog post shows 3 people working hot air desoldering stations without any visible ventilation, and with only one wearing a thin respirator. So it's probably not all that healthy for the workers even there. At least in the photos I've seen of Chinese electronics assembly factories, the workers have extraction units for their soldering stations.
Re: Amazing way Chinese recycle millions of cellphones every year
#5It's a shame that most e-waste recycling in China is not as clean and neat as this. Case in point, the town of Guiyu: http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1870162_182214... http://www.viceland.com/int/v14n9/htdocs/ctrl.php# (Don't get me wrong, responsible e-waste recycling is to be lauded and encouraged - it's all the more important because of places like Guiyu. I'm not too surprised Nokia choose to focus o…
most e-waste recycling in China is not as clean and neat as this Now I come to think about it, the original blog post shows 3 people working hot air desoldering stations without any visible ventilation, and with only one wearing a thin respirator. So it's probably not all that healthy for the workers even there. At least in the photos I've seen of Chinese electronics assembly factories, the workers have extraction un…
Do desoldering stations actually generate enough fumes to be comparable to actual soldering? When I do hot-air rework, I rarely see any smoke at all, unless I have just put a lot of flux down.
Re: Amazing way Chinese recycle millions of cellphones every year
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
most e-waste recycling in China is not as clean and neat as this Now I come to think about it, the original blog post shows 3 people working hot air desoldering stations without any visible ventilation, and with only one wearing a thin respirator. So it's probably not all that healthy for the workers even there. At least in the photos I've seen of Chinese electronics assembly factories, the workers have extraction un…
Do de soldering stations actually generate enough fumes to be comparable to actual soldering? When I do hot-air rework, I rarely see any smoke at all, unless I have just put a lot of flux down.
Yeah, you might be right. My understanding is the bulk of (at least visible) fumes when soldering are from flux, but there are other fumes present. When you're not temperature controlled then you probably have other things melting and fuming up as well though, depending on how deft you are.
Re: Amazing way Chinese recycle millions of cellphones every year
#7Garbage sorters in HK isn't a sight I've 100% gotten used to. It is extremely common (somewhere around 1 every 2KM you walk - and those are just the ones you catch actually at a garbage). They are mostly after cardboard from what I've seen - or maybe that's just what they find the most of.
As a general rule, they are all old and don't look particularly healthy. But they are hard working. I feel equal measures of shame and pride in humanity when I see one. It's actually an emotional experience for me for some weird reason.
I wish I knew more about them. What they earn, how long they work, how the system works (they seem to have local drop off centers which all have floor scales - so it must be paid by weight, and then it gets shipped off from there by god knows who).
Re: Amazing way Chinese recycle millions of cellphones every year
#8They are screwed when their middle-class gets big enough to cause inflation and labor is no longer cheap enough to abuse people like that.
They'll have to double the size of their prisons and use prison labor, and yet we'll keep buying.
Re: Amazing way Chinese recycle millions of cellphones every year
#9Someday, robots will be doing this with virtually everything tossed away. And they'll be taking apart our old landfills too.
Re: Amazing way Chinese recycle millions of cellphones every year
#10Garbage sorters in HK isn't a sight I've 100% gotten used to. It is extremely common (somewhere around 1 every 2KM you walk - and those are just the ones you catch actually at a garbage). They are mostly after cardboard from what I've seen - or maybe that's just what they find the most of. As a general rule, they are all old and don't look particularly healthy. But they are hard working. I feel equal measures of sham…
I've seen them too... on the one hand maybe they don't look as "healthy" as a Calvin Klein model. On the other hand, especially when watching the older ones -- they sure have kept their mobility and muscles in a working condition throughout the years doing what they do and they make me think of the majority of old folks back home whose bodies are often deteriorating and falling apart from NOT getting any physical exercise, from spending hours in front of the telly for years and from feeding themselves pure toxic junk food for decades. Well... it's a big world out there.