E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by tortarga » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 3:33 AM UTC

nerdponx wrote: post #24

guywithaphone wrote: post #22

I've tried both metals, refurbish and parts recycling... Refurbishing or selling for parts is MUCH more valuable than metals recycling. It's also MUCH MUCH more work. Three first problem is getting valuable E-waste at a good price. (Free or cheap in large quantities) then comes separating out older parts (higher gold content), then identifying and testing newer parts for refurbishing or parts sales. Then advertising…

Then factor in that newer computers and phones are getting much faster and/or using less power. This part is hard for me, as a big proponent of "reduce, reuse, recycle." Reduce isn't that hard until your technology becomes obsolete. Reuse is typically impossible because people don't throw out technology until it's obsolete. So recycling is the only option left.

Does "Obsolete" only apply to consumer grade applications though? Can there be a market for refurbishing old phones, laptops etc for IoT controllers that don't need massive processing power?

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

#62

Post by aurizon » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 3:35 AM UTC

Well, back in the old days, with gold bonded dies in ceramic housings almost all ICs had good value. This was in 1975 or so. Back in those days they also plated 30-50 micro inches on fingers. Then gold hit the roof, and all parts had gold "adders" = increased prices along with gold. They would like to use 1 micro inch plating on fingers, but copper and gold are totally miscible(same series in the periodic table) and with 1 micro inch the copper would migrate to the plated surface by diffusion and corrode with the CO2 in the air = green shit. Then they found that 5 micro inches of nickel plating would block diffusion and they could use 1 micro inch gold over nickel, so by 1985 or so, fingers began to decline. They are still valuable, but nor worth $100 a pound like the old military trimmed fingers were. So find scrap buried in the 1970s, and you might have a shot - but only if you get a lot of boards, refrigerators had very little gold.

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

#63

Post by MisterOctober » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 3:49 AM UTC

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...

^ fact. I work for a refurbishing company, and while some of the scrap generated gets a decent payout from the recycling folks [the best common category being old PII and PIII boards / older finger boards AKA controller cards], the negative value stuff like CRTs, fluorescent lamps, and Ni-Cad batteries is awful to deal with. The big CRT operation in my state shut down a while ago, so now they have to be sent out of state i.e., cost more now to offload.

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

#64

Post by MisterOctober » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 3:53 AM UTC

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…

You're right, most of the stuff is sent to China or elsewhere for actual extraction, due mainly to the environmental factors associated with processing [electronics are made of nasty stuff]. Labor's a factor as well, though the North American companies who do this have got their processes nailed down efficiencywise

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

#65

Post by kragen » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 6:57 AM UTC

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.

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 is slow compared to what you can do on the GPU or an FPGA or a TPU.

And, of course, it's not true that you should do this if you can't spend unlimited time writing your code. It's entirely reasonable to use slower languages like Python and JS if you can hack faster as a result. Since many of us are taking that entirely reasonable option, the number of CPU cycles needed to run basic applications is going up, which increases power consumption.

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

#66

Post by Symbiote » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 7:57 AM UTC

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?

In Sweden, "special rubbish trucks go around cities and pick up electronics and hazardous waste such as chemicals." (1). You can look up how that works exactly. It's Sweden's way to do the EU WEEE directive.

In Copenhagen (this probably varies across Denmark) I have a small electronics bin in the apartment building basement, with all the other bins. Officially, I think its to be used for anything that fits, with larger things taken somewhere else.

When I dispose of my desktop PC, I will take 5 minutes to unscrew the motherboard, drives, PSU etc and put them in the electronics bin. The case will go in the metal bin.

When I dispose of old elections at work, the whole lot goes in the large waste electronics container.

(1) https://sweden.se/nature/the-swedish-recycling-revolution/

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

#67

Post by littlestymaar » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 8:44 AM UTC

kragen wrote: post #65

bb88 wrote: post #42

Earlier 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…

> But it's not true today, because today hand-tuned assembly is slow compared to what you can do on the GPU or an FPGA or a TPU.

That's not how thing work. GPUs/TPUs aren't magic, they don't speed everything up: they are really good is some scenario, but they are really slow in many others: the cost of loading memory to the GPU and back from it has a huge cost and it's only worth it if the GPU has enough work to do with the workload.

In theory, you could write a web server that runs on the GPU (at least a majority of it, it will still need some CPU work obviously), but it would be incredibly slow, probably slower than if it was a regular web server running on a machine from the 90s.

FPGA are totally different beasts, you can theoretically speed up anything with them, but

1. that requires a LOT of work, and

2. they aren't new: anything you can do with FPGA today, you could do it in 1995 already.

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

#68

Post by nintendo1889 » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 9:21 AM UTC

tortarga wrote: post #61

nerdponx wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then factor in that newer computers and phones are getting much faster and/or using less power. This part is hard for me, as a big proponent of "reduce, reuse, recycle." Reduce isn't that hard until your technology becomes obsolete. Reuse is typically impossible because people don't throw out technology until it's obsolete. So recycling is the only option left.

Does "Obsolete" only apply to consumer grade applications though? Can there be a market for refurbishing old phones, laptops etc for IoT controllers that don't need massive processing power?

hmmm, I worked at google when they were doing a drive upgrade. They couldn't erase 100,000 hard drives (it would take years of time in the eraser machines) so they had to destroy them, which I assume meant melting them and eventually extracting the gold.

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

#69

Post by iamgopal » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 9:56 AM UTC

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…

Believe it or not but 1USD per hour is not poor country. Poor country be like 1 USD per day.

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

#70

Post by aplc0r » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 12:20 PM UTC

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…

I don't know about appliances, but the last few times I tried to repair a failed electronic device I found them to be un-repairable by design.

It is so frustrating to know that all something likely needs is a small surface component, but you can't repair it. Usually this is due to components being epoxied or dipped for seemingly no reason. At least thanks to ebay, you can sometimes find a duplicate broken device that can be harvested for whole PCBs.