This is why the saying has always been “reduce, reuse, recycle” in that order.
Reducing is the best. Don’t buy or make surplus stuff, and that reduces waste overall.
Reusing is second best. If we did make something, the best thing to do is get as much use out of it as possible to prevent it from ever becoming trash.
Recycling is the last resort. Regardless of what is being recycled, it is an expensive and difficult process to try to salvage any value from the waste materials rather than just abandoning them.
Because recycling electronics is such a difficult problem, if we want to reduce e-waste a better idea is to increase our efforts to reduce and reuse them as much as possible. Installing Linux on an old laptop to keep it useful for somebody is easy to do, and much more effective than trying to recycle it.
I find the "reduce, reuse, recycle" slogan misleading.
Everything that is manufactured will eventually become waste that must be disposed of responsibly. The overall volume of manufacturing only goes up if we leave it to the market, and there is no serious political will to legislate it down. That leaves us with an ever-increasing volume of waste that must be dealt with, making waste management an increasingly important issue.
I think you are forgetting about time. If the rate of stuff needing to get recycle is lower, then there is more time to recycle. If there the rate is too high then the facilities are overwhelmed and resort to less optimal strategies.
It's misleading because it focuses on actions that are clearly not working. People on the average are increasing their consumption, not reducing it. That means the actual problem — the waste at the end of the pipeline — is growing every year.
Waste management is the actual problem that needs to be solved. "Reduce and reuse" can be a part of the solution, but people are not doing enough voluntarily to make it a major part.
So the idea of reducing consumption is misleading, the real solution is to reduce consumption (via the law forcing quotas on manufacturers and rationing on consumers)
Ignoring the ambiguity of the word "refuse", that often means "turn into trash", it's also completely redundant with "reduce". To the point that it doesn't add anything new.
How confusing. There's no appreciable difference between "refuse" and "reduce". "Rot" is only applicable to organic waste, which is rarely considered part of "recycling" since the other Rs don't really apply.
Consumers have the option to "refuse" products from irresponsible or predatory vendors: ones which brick or obsolete devices.
Vendors should at a minimum open source APIs for abandoned hardware and allow unlocking it. "Refuse" to buy from those that don't. Ask for legislation forcing it.
I have a wonderful old ipad mini that's useless. I'd love to jailbreak it and put my OS on there but Apple wants a new sale instead.
A lot of "biodegradable" will use a literal interpretation, in that it it degrades in nature. 500 years you say? But it still degrades...
Home compostable is really the only one that makes sense. Even industrial composting requires a high heat environment as the catalyst, so if something contaminates the batch and goes into general refuse then it will never break down.
Bio degradable packaging is not really suitable for composting yourself. Most of it takes a really long time to break down naturally or requires high composting temperatures that can be hard to achieve in a home compost pile. This is true even for basic stuff like cardboard and paper. You also need a lot of "green"[1] (high nitrogen) composting material to balance out cellulose from packaging.
The net result is that this is still an industrial process. Though probably less energy-intensive than recycling.
Source: we have a compost pile and it's not all sunshine and roses.
The ultimate reason is there isn't economic reason so. It cost's a lot to recycle anything, and most electronics would net you almost nothing valuable.
Let's look at an example. Let's say your phones main board, which will net a few hundred grams of raw materials. First thing by weight the actual board itself is probably the biggest, if you could perfectly decompose it to it's parts you would have some fiberglass, glue, a few grams of copper, and maybe a trace amount of gold. Next you would have the different components, mostly ICs but let's cover them next. These are mostly plastic with bits of copper, tin, and other more exotic metals. Most of these could be used again, if you can separate them and sort them. There would be a bunch of solder, which maybe could be reused, if you remix it with more flux. Finally, you'll have chips, these could be reused, but only as replacements for the same chip. Getting anything out of these would mostly be removing the bulk of the material which is silicon that's been contaminated with other elements to make the semiconductors. I don't think there is any process right now that could take doped Si and get you anything back. Besides the silicon you have micrograms of gold and other conductors.
Having put all that down, I think there could be an opportunity to take the bulk components off boards, test and sort them, and sell them in bulk.
Repairability would help as well. Many times the only viable option to fix something is to swap a board, or replace the entire item, instead of replacing the one failed component that caused the board to fail, or reflowing the board etc.. Many components also do not offer batteries that can be replaced, such as the magic mouse, so you end up needing to replace the entire item.
It's interesting how as certain things age, such as cars, cottage industries pop up to do just that when new replacement boards and parts are not available.
The other issue is cost cutting. Many components are made cheaply and fail pre-maturely. Great examples of this are mains voltage LED bulbs where the rectifier circuits that power the LED's fail, but the only real option is to replace the entire thing, creating a lot of e-waste in the process.
Changing the PCB for a known-good one: $10 + maybe half an hour of low-skill work.
Changing the failing component: maybe a few minutes, probably a few hours of an electronics engineer that's familiar with the design (plus his expensive tools). He's probably bad at soldering, so you'll need someone else to do that. Then you need to revalidate the board.
It almost never make economical sense to try to repair the board.
The fact that we tolerate creating waste because it's "economical" is frankly disgusting. The disposal fees for e waste should make it uneconomical to dispose of boards.
Also training techs to repair SMD parts is really easy and cheap, you're grossly overestimating the costs. The real waste comes from boards with designs that can't be repaired so we tolerate a certain yield. For many small devices the yields are shockingly low.
The other thing is that yields are low because of bad designs. If it became uneconomical for you to throw half your boards out then designers would fix their crappy boards with tombstoned jellybean parts because they used shitty footprint libraries. This is a solvable engineering problem and it's gross that it's cheaper to throw shit into a landfill instead of fixing it.
> The fact that we tolerate creating waste because it's "economical" is frankly disgusting.
I don't think anyone here is suggesting we "tolerate" it, but describing the economic incentives that exist.
> The disposal fees for e waste should make it uneconomical to dispose of boards.
I can't think of any number that you could pick that wouldn't either be ineffective, or cause unintended effects. At $10, that's a drop in the bucket compared to labor costs of component level repair. At $100, you're going to see the local lake filled with obsolete cell phones, which is even worse than them being in a landfill.
I'm all for repairability, but as labor costs go up and manufacturing costs go down, the window for which there is incentive to repair narrows.
e.g. there's no amount of repairability design that you could apply to a $3 light bulb which would encourage people to pay someone western wages to repair. I think we're better off lobbying for better standards to communicate the quality of a bulb's design. The whole reason we have crappy LED bulbs to begin with is because the $3 overdriven bulb with crap components jammed into a tiny enclosure looks like a better deal on the shelf than a bulky $20 bulb with a large heat sink and lower output.
And the labor required to do component level repair is wildly expensive and limited (YouTubers who do it on principle notwithstanding), even further narrowing that window.
Human-scale engineering is underrated. It is very satisfying when you can repair something yourself using your hands, without having to need specialist equipment.
For example when you have a circuit board that can be serviced with a soldering iron, without having to use a microscope or reflow-oven.
There was a cartel, but this is one of those "more complicated than it appears" situations. In incandescent bulbs, there is a real tradeoff between durability of the bulb, efficiency (lumens/watt), and brightness/quality of the light, for physics reasons you _can't_ improve one without degrading the other.
Since "quality of light" is a very difficult thing to market, there was an incentive to push "lifetime of the bulb" in marketing and just make the light quality increasingly worse. The cartel attempted to halt that by making everyone agree on a lifetime/quality to hit and not participate in a race to the bottom (and yes, there was also the obvious benefit to the cartel members of increased sales and profits, which they explicitly talked about in internal documents).
I want to be very clear that I'm anti cartels and I'm not trying to say "so this was all hunky dory", just that this was not (and these things very rarely are) a simple case of "they made the product objectively worse for the sole sake of more money". Instead, they chose a different point on the pareto-frontier of brightness/efficiency/lifespan that also had the benefit of making them more money.
But yes, LED bulbs are currently mostly garbage and have terrible heat/power management electronics which means that in practice you almost never get anywhere close to the theoretical life span increases (because the electronics die from overheating far before the actual LEDs themselves would go out), and finding out information on how well a given bulb brand does on heat/power management is essentially impossible.
TechnologyConnections debunked the Phoebus Cartel a while ago.
tl;dw incandescent bulbs can be made more efficient and brighter by running them hotter, but this reduces the lifetime. The obvious Nash Equilibrium involves increasingly hot/bright/efficient bulbs and as much lying about lifetime as a typical consumer would accept, which is a lot. The idea behind the Phoebus Cartel was to force honesty on the dimension where it was most likely to disappear. You are free to disapprove of this and reject bulb lifetime policing, but if so you support the "everybody lies" alternative. Pick your poison.
At some point in the 90s I remember hearing an NPR story about a new startup that was "pioneering" technology that would basically permit atomic/small-molecule level "cat cracking" of just about anything: a furnace that was so hot that everything put inside it broke down to atoms/small-molecules which could then be fractionated off for re-use.
That one seems like it should fall foul of thermodynamics, I guess. Just melting everything together probably increases entropy to the extent that it's at best like extracting elements from mining ore. Whereas before you do that, there is organisation and substances are more concentrated. Well, that's a bit hand-wavy - perhaps someone with actual knowledge of thermodynamics will comment.
I think what recyclers do currently is at least break everything into small pieces, some of which might have a decent concentration of something useful
Nothing falls afoul of thermodynamics. This is not a closed system - you can inject as much energy into as you have available. Entropy and thermodynamics play no role here, but I would imagine that (a) the cost of the energy require (b) containment technology (c) what happens after you extract a given substance are/were all very involved in its failure.
This is already done with crude oil, and is called "cat cracking". You heat the crude oil until every component in it becomes gaseous (but still small-molecule) - the smaller the molecules they higher they rise up the "chimney", so you can siphon off particular components at particular heights.
I think that plastic parts, such as enclosures for electronic devices, should have resin identification codes moulded in them — just like plastic packaging does, so they could be recycled too within the same system.
I wonder if part of it is also that mining companies are generally allowed to just leave their tailings in a big pile near the mine rather than have to responsibly dispose of the majority of the ore that has no (or negative) commercial value.
Ease of recycling is not prioritized during design or manufacturing because there is no monetary incentive (for the manufacturer) to do so it most cases. It would eat into profits. Simple as that.
Unless a component is expensive to manufactory and recycling/reuse could save the manufacturer money it won't happen. The only real solution are laws requiring it.
The full cost of recycling things should be part of the cost of the product at the time of sale.
What you would find quickly, is that there is little to no profit on the manufacturing and sale of new devices and the value of repairs and reuse would skyrocket.
Right now companies are allowed to steal money from the future by ignoring the problem of what happens to these devices once they leave the factory. The truth is that they become hazardous waste, and lock away valuable resources inside of trash.
The reality is that there is no real economic benefit to the current model of ever increasing sales of new goods. But the capitalists, as ever, have been extracting money out of it by making the unpleasant, expensive parts someone else's liability. Namely ours.
Riches built from value extraction and arbitrage against the future. And most of us cannot conceive of it being any other way.
At some point, sockets add enough failure modes that making components switchable increases the amount of waste. And it's not a far, theoretical point; it's one we often meet in practice.
Any regulation about that has to be detail-focused and conservative.
Probably more nonprofits could be started that just cost extra money to recycle stuff (like, you might not be able to make it into a business where the recycled stuff pays for itself, but people might be willing to pay to prevent e-waste from being created)
I like how threads like this are like a reverse nesting doll. Somebody says the problem is the specific metals, then someone says it is recovery processes, then market forces, then legislation, and I think I spied a comment on thermodynamics.
I will take a shot in the dark somewhere in the middle. Intellectual property. As long as transparency and standardization are disincentivized it will be pretty hard to orchestrate un-building anything.
I wonder if we're converging on all products becoming "good enough" that the pace of innovation will slow and this will change for the better?
tear apart even the most primitive device with a plastic shell, lcd , pcb and power supply . None of those separate components are easily "recycled" .
The concept that materials are Recyclable by default is just a myth. It's very hard to turn waste into a refined and usable input material to produce another quality product that meets consumer expectations.
That is true but it is unclear why you believe that to apply to recycling electronics. I doubt anyone can put hard numbers on the environmental costs involved.
Well it seems uneven. The materials in electronics are so varied that there seem to be different levels of recycling, hopefully with materials pricing going up the worst forms of recycling can go away.
I was shocked to find that even electronics that are collected in Europe seem to be shipped to Africa, set on fire, and at most, metals are collected from the ashes, including traces of gold and copper. That's about it. Batteries have a bit better recycling path but not by much.
On the upside, at some point the ground in those infamous electronics "recycling" towns will become so contaminated they'll be able to strip-mine for rare earths!
A lot of recycling seems to amount to shipping waste overseas so it can be disposed of in jurisdictions with few/no environmental protections. Pretty sad state of affairs.
The reason is simply that there are not enough incentives for manufacturers to do so. I would be happy if nothing on smartphones was glued together but everything was screwed or plugged in, and if I could simply replace batteries in smartphones and laptops, as was the case in the past. If these things are not made mandatory requirements, the thinner device, the lighter device, the device where the manufacturer can use battery life as the upper limit for device life will win.
I don't know anything about chips and boards, but in the EU, a regulation will come into force in 2027 that requires batteries in portable devices to be replaceable by the user without special tools.
It comes down to entropy and cost of labour. It takes more work to undo entropy turning a complex material mix which is either an appliance still intact or crushed and mixed even more back into its raw materials.
Processing mineral ores into raw materials is cheaper.
So the only way is to regulate market, meaning forcing companies to put in the extra work.
Currently these regulations tend to be circumvented by illegally exporting e-waste into countries with cheap labour, no such regulations or corruption (usually all at the same time).
But us hobbyists can help out. I get about half of my electronic components for free or close to free by parting out electronics that others are throwing away or sending to e-waste centers.
Everything is very unrecyclable, because there are no laws forcing true recycling.
Designing something to be recyclable and also designing the equipment that could recycle it is much more expensive than designing it to be just dumped as garbage and designing only the equipment needed to make it from pure raw materials.
Using most materials in closed cycles (except those that can already be recycled efficiently by living beings), which is absolutely necessary for the survival of mankind, will never happen unless mandated by law, because any business tries to push such costs to someone else.
Recycling will happen only when the sales of any object will be forbidden, unless the raw materials from which it has been made, besides a list of exceptions, can be recovered in a very high proportion, e.g. 99% and someone will be liable if this does not happen.
Obviously, if such laws will ever be adopted, they would have to implemented very gradually, i.e. there should be a grace period of several years, and then the mandated efficiency of recycling should be initially very low, with a plan to raise every few years. Similarly, the number of exceptions might be initially large, but then some of the exceptions should be eliminated when adequate technologies are developed.
For now, there is no serious research in true recycling technologies, which really reverse the fabrication process of a product, because there are neither any money to be gained from having such technologies, nor any money to be lost from not having such technologies.
Electronics devices are harder to recycle completely than almost anything else, because besides materials that are used in great quantities, e.g. plastic, copper and silicon, there are a lot of chemical elements that are used in minute quantities, e.g. arsenic, antimony, germanium, hafnium, cobalt, tungsten and many others.
Those elements, even if they are much more valuable than the major elements from an electronic device, are also much more difficult to extract from a device, because of their very low proportion.
Recycling stuff is hard, expensive, and energy-intensive. Why should electronics be uniquely recyclable?
We need to get past this idea that just because recycling makes you feel good must mean it IS good. Most of the time recycling stuff uses more CO2 than simply throwing it into a hole and making another one.
I guess one aspect is that electronics are not one homogeneous thing but often very complex composites of many things, bonded together in a way so that they can resist the temperature etc. that they operate under.
That's very different from say a newspaper, a glass
bottle or a Coca Cola can.
When we design these things (which I do for a living) we often find we are forced into tradeoffs between repairability/recycleability and manufacturability/cost. The market wants cheaper and cheaper things. To accommodate we need to make them less repairable and recyclable.
Infortunately, this is where free market stops being a good optimizer and manual settings (laws) need to apply by requiring raiparability, which is difficult (but not completely impossible) to quantify.
A big issue is that most electronics are optimized for cost and performance, not disassembly. Once components are tightly integrated and bonded together, separating materials becomes economically harder than producing new ones. Design-for-recycling would need to be a requirement early in the product lifecycle.
The concept of Recycling ( nearly all the materials can be reused with little cost or impact) is a myth. There are relatively few consumer products or materials that are readily recycled.
It's not so much that electronics are unrecyclable, it's that nearly everything is unrecyclable.
Recycling is nearly a fantasy. For the most part it has been a campaign for waste management firms to charge customers double while demanding they separate their own garbage, and punish them for doing it wrong. The charade lasted so long because much of the "recycling" was dumped in Asia and ended up in the ocean from there.
Recycling works best when you have a big lump of bulk material which can be melted down and reforged/recast. Aluminum cans are some of the best objects for recycling because apart from the labels they are almost pure aluminum, and so you just toss them in a furnace and get the constituent material back.
Electronics are the exact opposite of this: they’re highly heterogenous, with bits of material scattered all over the place. Also, most of that material isn’t particularly valuable: silicon is literally as abundant as sand. So all you can really do is melt it all into slag or dissolve it in acid and then try to extract the trace amounts of valuable bits like gold, but this is so energy-intensive for so little material that it’s not worth it at any reasonable material price.
repairability would help quite a bit. How many times do you have to replace an entire board in something when replacing just a component would actually fix things?
bluntly: a lack of regulation mandating that consumer goods manufacturing responsibilities cover the lifecycle of the goods (including end-of-life).
yes i'm fully aware that recycling components is difficult and costly; if you truly believe in the market as an innovating force, you could stand to be a little more optimistic that we could make this a reality :)
USB-C charger reuse is now common (Apple chargers still gets the UK/EU law exemption)
RoHS prevents Pb content in recycled parts (less toxic waste)
Lithium battery recycling drop bins are next to the store entrance (financial incentives)
ATX12V/EPS12V power supply in your PC is a standard component between motherboards
Aluminum and steel instead of plastics is common (consumers like the aesthetics too)
Under the guise of recycling, problems arise when third-world people use vats of acid to strip trace gold/platinum from electronics. Others strip, relabel (laser marking), and resell aged chips as new stock... this can cause safety/reliability problems.
Some firms now use solder centrifuges to extract RoHS solder off parts, and resell the tin bar-solder back to manufacturers.
e-Waste can be a desirable resource, but few people want old Lead contaminated CRT or mixed plastic filled with inserts etc.
Companies like AMD with AM5 compatibility across chip generations should get an award for their great work reducing waste. Linux <6.0.8 kept a lot of laptops out of the landfills too, but now kernel >6.0.15 will no longer support old GPU/Laptops as NVIDIA ends legacy driver support. =3
This is why the saying has always been “reduce, reuse, recycle” in that order.
Reducing is the best. Don’t buy or make surplus stuff, and that reduces waste overall.
Reusing is second best. If we did make something, the best thing to do is get as much use out of it as possible to prevent it from ever becoming trash.
Recycling is the last resort. Regardless of what is being recycled, it is an expensive and difficult process to try to salvage any value from the waste materials rather than just abandoning them.
Because recycling electronics is such a difficult problem, if we want to reduce e-waste a better idea is to increase our efforts to reduce and reuse them as much as possible. Installing Linux on an old laptop to keep it useful for somebody is easy to do, and much more effective than trying to recycle it.
I find the "reduce, reuse, recycle" slogan misleading.
Everything that is manufactured will eventually become waste that must be disposed of responsibly. The overall volume of manufacturing only goes up if we leave it to the market, and there is no serious political will to legislate it down. That leaves us with an ever-increasing volume of waste that must be dealt with, making waste management an increasingly important issue.
I think you are forgetting about time. If the rate of stuff needing to get recycle is lower, then there is more time to recycle. If there the rate is too high then the facilities are overwhelmed and resort to less optimal strategies.
This is why reduce and reuse are important.
It's misleading because it focuses on actions that are clearly not working. People on the average are increasing their consumption, not reducing it. That means the actual problem — the waste at the end of the pipeline — is growing every year.
Waste management is the actual problem that needs to be solved. "Reduce and reuse" can be a part of the solution, but people are not doing enough voluntarily to make it a major part.
So the idea of reducing consumption is misleading, the real solution is to reduce consumption (via the law forcing quotas on manufacturers and rationing on consumers)
Durability also cuts consumption. One can make the parts that break easy to replace and/or learn to do it at scale.
I heard they changed it to 5Rs.
Refuse, reduce, reuse, recyle, rot.
Ignoring the ambiguity of the word "refuse", that often means "turn into trash", it's also completely redundant with "reduce". To the point that it doesn't add anything new.
Anyway, "rot" is a good one.
I like that a lot -- going to start using it
It’s even better when you make it 10 Rs: refuse, rethink, reduce, reuse, repair, repurpose, rehome, recycle, rot.
I think it’s twice as better.
How confusing. There's no appreciable difference between "refuse" and "reduce". "Rot" is only applicable to organic waste, which is rarely considered part of "recycling" since the other Rs don't really apply.
Seems like change for change's sake.
Consumers have the option to "refuse" products from irresponsible or predatory vendors: ones which brick or obsolete devices.
Vendors should at a minimum open source APIs for abandoned hardware and allow unlocking it. "Refuse" to buy from those that don't. Ask for legislation forcing it.
I have a wonderful old ipad mini that's useless. I'd love to jailbreak it and put my OS on there but Apple wants a new sale instead.
I read it as refuse categorically and rot regardless of type in a big sweep from best to worst
refuse to use any, reduce your usage, reuse yourself, recycle them into new products, or else they'll just rot
I like it.
Rot is about using bio-degradable options where there is one
if all fails, just leave an option for nature to do it for you
You have to be careful with that phrase through.
> using bio-degradable options where there is one
A lot of "biodegradable" will use a literal interpretation, in that it it degrades in nature. 500 years you say? But it still degrades...
Home compostable is really the only one that makes sense. Even industrial composting requires a high heat environment as the catalyst, so if something contaminates the batch and goes into general refuse then it will never break down.
500 years is only a blink in Earths lifespan.
Bio degradable packaging is not really suitable for composting yourself. Most of it takes a really long time to break down naturally or requires high composting temperatures that can be hard to achieve in a home compost pile. This is true even for basic stuff like cardboard and paper. You also need a lot of "green"[1] (high nitrogen) composting material to balance out cellulose from packaging.
The net result is that this is still an industrial process. Though probably less energy-intensive than recycling.
Source: we have a compost pile and it's not all sunshine and roses.
[1] https://www.thespruce.com/composting-greens-and-browns-25394...
They also sometimes coat your "compostable" bowls/plates/boxes in PFAS: https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/pfas-compostable-food-packag...
The ultimate reason is there isn't economic reason so. It cost's a lot to recycle anything, and most electronics would net you almost nothing valuable.
Let's look at an example. Let's say your phones main board, which will net a few hundred grams of raw materials. First thing by weight the actual board itself is probably the biggest, if you could perfectly decompose it to it's parts you would have some fiberglass, glue, a few grams of copper, and maybe a trace amount of gold. Next you would have the different components, mostly ICs but let's cover them next. These are mostly plastic with bits of copper, tin, and other more exotic metals. Most of these could be used again, if you can separate them and sort them. There would be a bunch of solder, which maybe could be reused, if you remix it with more flux. Finally, you'll have chips, these could be reused, but only as replacements for the same chip. Getting anything out of these would mostly be removing the bulk of the material which is silicon that's been contaminated with other elements to make the semiconductors. I don't think there is any process right now that could take doped Si and get you anything back. Besides the silicon you have micrograms of gold and other conductors.
Having put all that down, I think there could be an opportunity to take the bulk components off boards, test and sort them, and sell them in bulk.
There are stats that in 1t of recycled smartphones is around 200g of Gold, while in mining 1t contains around 2-3% of Gold.
Does this match somehow?
> opportunity to take the bulk components off boards, test and sort them, and sell them in bulk.
I think this is already happening in China for certain components.
Repairability would help as well. Many times the only viable option to fix something is to swap a board, or replace the entire item, instead of replacing the one failed component that caused the board to fail, or reflowing the board etc.. Many components also do not offer batteries that can be replaced, such as the magic mouse, so you end up needing to replace the entire item.
It's interesting how as certain things age, such as cars, cottage industries pop up to do just that when new replacement boards and parts are not available.
The other issue is cost cutting. Many components are made cheaply and fail pre-maturely. Great examples of this are mains voltage LED bulbs where the rectifier circuits that power the LED's fail, but the only real option is to replace the entire thing, creating a lot of e-waste in the process.
Changing the PCB for a known-good one: $10 + maybe half an hour of low-skill work.
Changing the failing component: maybe a few minutes, probably a few hours of an electronics engineer that's familiar with the design (plus his expensive tools). He's probably bad at soldering, so you'll need someone else to do that. Then you need to revalidate the board.
It almost never make economical sense to try to repair the board.
If you have a surplus of donor components, board-level repair can be very feasible and often even profitable depending on the board.
The fact that we tolerate creating waste because it's "economical" is frankly disgusting. The disposal fees for e waste should make it uneconomical to dispose of boards.
Also training techs to repair SMD parts is really easy and cheap, you're grossly overestimating the costs. The real waste comes from boards with designs that can't be repaired so we tolerate a certain yield. For many small devices the yields are shockingly low.
The other thing is that yields are low because of bad designs. If it became uneconomical for you to throw half your boards out then designers would fix their crappy boards with tombstoned jellybean parts because they used shitty footprint libraries. This is a solvable engineering problem and it's gross that it's cheaper to throw shit into a landfill instead of fixing it.
> The fact that we tolerate creating waste because it's "economical" is frankly disgusting.
I don't think anyone here is suggesting we "tolerate" it, but describing the economic incentives that exist.
> The disposal fees for e waste should make it uneconomical to dispose of boards.
I can't think of any number that you could pick that wouldn't either be ineffective, or cause unintended effects. At $10, that's a drop in the bucket compared to labor costs of component level repair. At $100, you're going to see the local lake filled with obsolete cell phones, which is even worse than them being in a landfill.
I'm all for repairability, but as labor costs go up and manufacturing costs go down, the window for which there is incentive to repair narrows.
e.g. there's no amount of repairability design that you could apply to a $3 light bulb which would encourage people to pay someone western wages to repair. I think we're better off lobbying for better standards to communicate the quality of a bulb's design. The whole reason we have crappy LED bulbs to begin with is because the $3 overdriven bulb with crap components jammed into a tiny enclosure looks like a better deal on the shelf than a bulky $20 bulb with a large heat sink and lower output.
And the labor required to do component level repair is wildly expensive and limited (YouTubers who do it on principle notwithstanding), even further narrowing that window.
Human-scale engineering is underrated. It is very satisfying when you can repair something yourself using your hands, without having to need specialist equipment.
For example when you have a circuit board that can be serviced with a soldering iron, without having to use a microscope or reflow-oven.
It is underrated in terms of personal satisfaction. It is overrated in terms of potential impact to municipal waste management.
Exactly! That's what motivated us to design a repairable e-bike battery at https://infinite-battery.com
Seeing LED bulb reliability rapidly degrade as the technology matured was like seeing the Phoebus Cartel[1] play out in real time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
There was a cartel, but this is one of those "more complicated than it appears" situations. In incandescent bulbs, there is a real tradeoff between durability of the bulb, efficiency (lumens/watt), and brightness/quality of the light, for physics reasons you _can't_ improve one without degrading the other.
Since "quality of light" is a very difficult thing to market, there was an incentive to push "lifetime of the bulb" in marketing and just make the light quality increasingly worse. The cartel attempted to halt that by making everyone agree on a lifetime/quality to hit and not participate in a race to the bottom (and yes, there was also the obvious benefit to the cartel members of increased sales and profits, which they explicitly talked about in internal documents).
I want to be very clear that I'm anti cartels and I'm not trying to say "so this was all hunky dory", just that this was not (and these things very rarely are) a simple case of "they made the product objectively worse for the sole sake of more money". Instead, they chose a different point on the pareto-frontier of brightness/efficiency/lifespan that also had the benefit of making them more money.
But yes, LED bulbs are currently mostly garbage and have terrible heat/power management electronics which means that in practice you almost never get anywhere close to the theoretical life span increases (because the electronics die from overheating far before the actual LEDs themselves would go out), and finding out information on how well a given bulb brand does on heat/power management is essentially impossible.
I wish we had a Phoebus Cartel to enforce an expected 50k-hour lifetime.
TechnologyConnections debunked the Phoebus Cartel a while ago.
tl;dw incandescent bulbs can be made more efficient and brighter by running them hotter, but this reduces the lifetime. The obvious Nash Equilibrium involves increasingly hot/bright/efficient bulbs and as much lying about lifetime as a typical consumer would accept, which is a lot. The idea behind the Phoebus Cartel was to force honesty on the dimension where it was most likely to disappear. You are free to disapprove of this and reject bulb lifetime policing, but if so you support the "everybody lies" alternative. Pick your poison.
> TechnologyConnections debunked the Phoebus Cartel a while ago.
A link would be good, to mirror the one in the GP.
https://youtu.be/zb7Bs98KmnY
Collecting small things from many sources over meaningful distances is hard.
Separating things made of many materials is hard, especially when some components are hazardous.
Purifying materials drawn from waste is hard.
These aren’t impossible challenges, but physical facts of the problem that have kept costs too high for electronics recycling to be widespread.
Longer lasting electronics that can be repurposed or reused is the lever I’d be most excited to pull here.
At some point in the 90s I remember hearing an NPR story about a new startup that was "pioneering" technology that would basically permit atomic/small-molecule level "cat cracking" of just about anything: a furnace that was so hot that everything put inside it broke down to atoms/small-molecules which could then be fractionated off for re-use.
I was so excited. I was so naive.
The idea seems to have gone nowhere.
That one seems like it should fall foul of thermodynamics, I guess. Just melting everything together probably increases entropy to the extent that it's at best like extracting elements from mining ore. Whereas before you do that, there is organisation and substances are more concentrated. Well, that's a bit hand-wavy - perhaps someone with actual knowledge of thermodynamics will comment.
I think what recyclers do currently is at least break everything into small pieces, some of which might have a decent concentration of something useful
Nothing falls afoul of thermodynamics. This is not a closed system - you can inject as much energy into as you have available. Entropy and thermodynamics play no role here, but I would imagine that (a) the cost of the energy require (b) containment technology (c) what happens after you extract a given substance are/were all very involved in its failure.
This is already done with crude oil, and is called "cat cracking". You heat the crude oil until every component in it becomes gaseous (but still small-molecule) - the smaller the molecules they higher they rise up the "chimney", so you can siphon off particular components at particular heights.
I think that plastic parts, such as enclosures for electronic devices, should have resin identification codes moulded in them — just like plastic packaging does, so they could be recycled too within the same system.
Depends on what you are trying to recover. Recovering precious metals from electronics is no more difficult than processing precious metal ore.
Which comes back around to logistics and scale: refining ore is cheap because ore is delivered on multiple 300t haul trucks or in giant trains
I wonder if part of it is also that mining companies are generally allowed to just leave their tailings in a big pile near the mine rather than have to responsibly dispose of the majority of the ore that has no (or negative) commercial value.
> Longer lasting electronics that can be repurposed or reused is the lever I’d be most excited to pull here.
Capitalists are pulling the lever in the other direction, though. And there's many of them. Or they pay people to pull.
Ease of recycling is not prioritized during design or manufacturing because there is no monetary incentive (for the manufacturer) to do so it most cases. It would eat into profits. Simple as that.
Unless a component is expensive to manufactory and recycling/reuse could save the manufacturer money it won't happen. The only real solution are laws requiring it.
The full cost of recycling things should be part of the cost of the product at the time of sale.
What you would find quickly, is that there is little to no profit on the manufacturing and sale of new devices and the value of repairs and reuse would skyrocket.
Right now companies are allowed to steal money from the future by ignoring the problem of what happens to these devices once they leave the factory. The truth is that they become hazardous waste, and lock away valuable resources inside of trash.
The reality is that there is no real economic benefit to the current model of ever increasing sales of new goods. But the capitalists, as ever, have been extracting money out of it by making the unpleasant, expensive parts someone else's liability. Namely ours.
Riches built from value extraction and arbitrage against the future. And most of us cannot conceive of it being any other way.
It should be regulated to make devices repairable and upgradeable.
End soldering of components to motherboard. Make service manuals publicly available. Components sold and available.
At some point, sockets add enough failure modes that making components switchable increases the amount of waste. And it's not a far, theoretical point; it's one we often meet in practice.
Any regulation about that has to be detail-focused and conservative.
NO! We have enough regulations already
Probably more nonprofits could be started that just cost extra money to recycle stuff (like, you might not be able to make it into a business where the recycled stuff pays for itself, but people might be willing to pay to prevent e-waste from being created)
I like how threads like this are like a reverse nesting doll. Somebody says the problem is the specific metals, then someone says it is recovery processes, then market forces, then legislation, and I think I spied a comment on thermodynamics.
I will take a shot in the dark somewhere in the middle. Intellectual property. As long as transparency and standardization are disincentivized it will be pretty hard to orchestrate un-building anything.
I wonder if we're converging on all products becoming "good enough" that the pace of innovation will slow and this will change for the better?
tear apart even the most primitive device with a plastic shell, lcd , pcb and power supply . None of those separate components are easily "recycled" .
The concept that materials are Recyclable by default is just a myth. It's very hard to turn waste into a refined and usable input material to produce another quality product that meets consumer expectations.
Energy has an environmental cost. If the energy required to recycle is more than the environmental cost it's not worth it.
That is true but it is unclear why you believe that to apply to recycling electronics. I doubt anyone can put hard numbers on the environmental costs involved.
If the moon is a folding chair, then pigs can fly.
If my grandmother had wheels, she would've been a bike.
Well it seems uneven. The materials in electronics are so varied that there seem to be different levels of recycling, hopefully with materials pricing going up the worst forms of recycling can go away.
China sells a machine for anything you can imagine: Here is a wire grinding machine to recover the copper from wires: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/p_hmDdGIk7g
PCBs first seem to be cut up before put into similar machines machine above: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WO-VvucMq4E
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/q_O1EpEcKaM
Dont know what happens to the ground epoxy resin, maybe mixed with other materials?
I was shocked to find that even electronics that are collected in Europe seem to be shipped to Africa, set on fire, and at most, metals are collected from the ashes, including traces of gold and copper. That's about it. Batteries have a bit better recycling path but not by much.
On the upside, at some point the ground in those infamous electronics "recycling" towns will become so contaminated they'll be able to strip-mine for rare earths!
A lot of recycling seems to amount to shipping waste overseas so it can be disposed of in jurisdictions with few/no environmental protections. Pretty sad state of affairs.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/waste-recyclables-malaysia-p...
The reason is simply that there are not enough incentives for manufacturers to do so. I would be happy if nothing on smartphones was glued together but everything was screwed or plugged in, and if I could simply replace batteries in smartphones and laptops, as was the case in the past. If these things are not made mandatory requirements, the thinner device, the lighter device, the device where the manufacturer can use battery life as the upper limit for device life will win.
I don't know anything about chips and boards, but in the EU, a regulation will come into force in 2027 that requires batteries in portable devices to be replaceable by the user without special tools.
It comes down to entropy and cost of labour. It takes more work to undo entropy turning a complex material mix which is either an appliance still intact or crushed and mixed even more back into its raw materials.
Processing mineral ores into raw materials is cheaper.
So the only way is to regulate market, meaning forcing companies to put in the extra work.
Currently these regulations tend to be circumvented by illegally exporting e-waste into countries with cheap labour, no such regulations or corruption (usually all at the same time).
Short answer: it's too expensive.
But us hobbyists can help out. I get about half of my electronic components for free or close to free by parting out electronics that others are throwing away or sending to e-waste centers.
Everything is very unrecyclable, because there are no laws forcing true recycling.
Designing something to be recyclable and also designing the equipment that could recycle it is much more expensive than designing it to be just dumped as garbage and designing only the equipment needed to make it from pure raw materials.
Using most materials in closed cycles (except those that can already be recycled efficiently by living beings), which is absolutely necessary for the survival of mankind, will never happen unless mandated by law, because any business tries to push such costs to someone else.
Recycling will happen only when the sales of any object will be forbidden, unless the raw materials from which it has been made, besides a list of exceptions, can be recovered in a very high proportion, e.g. 99% and someone will be liable if this does not happen.
Obviously, if such laws will ever be adopted, they would have to implemented very gradually, i.e. there should be a grace period of several years, and then the mandated efficiency of recycling should be initially very low, with a plan to raise every few years. Similarly, the number of exceptions might be initially large, but then some of the exceptions should be eliminated when adequate technologies are developed.
For now, there is no serious research in true recycling technologies, which really reverse the fabrication process of a product, because there are neither any money to be gained from having such technologies, nor any money to be lost from not having such technologies.
Electronics devices are harder to recycle completely than almost anything else, because besides materials that are used in great quantities, e.g. plastic, copper and silicon, there are a lot of chemical elements that are used in minute quantities, e.g. arsenic, antimony, germanium, hafnium, cobalt, tungsten and many others.
Those elements, even if they are much more valuable than the major elements from an electronic device, are also much more difficult to extract from a device, because of their very low proportion.
Recycling stuff is hard, expensive, and energy-intensive. Why should electronics be uniquely recyclable?
We need to get past this idea that just because recycling makes you feel good must mean it IS good. Most of the time recycling stuff uses more CO2 than simply throwing it into a hole and making another one.
I guess one aspect is that electronics are not one homogeneous thing but often very complex composites of many things, bonded together in a way so that they can resist the temperature etc. that they operate under.
That's very different from say a newspaper, a glass bottle or a Coca Cola can.
Because they are so manufacturable.
When we design these things (which I do for a living) we often find we are forced into tradeoffs between repairability/recycleability and manufacturability/cost. The market wants cheaper and cheaper things. To accommodate we need to make them less repairable and recyclable.
Infortunately, this is where free market stops being a good optimizer and manual settings (laws) need to apply by requiring raiparability, which is difficult (but not completely impossible) to quantify.
Not to be glib, but the second law of thermodynamics.
You are attempting to filter out trace amounts valuable dopants and some small amounts of metals with value from, essentially, a pile of sand.
This is not energetically or chemically easy.
The second law of thermodynamics is very forgiving here. It's actually not the problem. Energy depends on the log of the concentration.
The problem is with our technology; we don't know how to recycle things well.
A big issue is that most electronics are optimized for cost and performance, not disassembly. Once components are tightly integrated and bonded together, separating materials becomes economically harder than producing new ones. Design-for-recycling would need to be a requirement early in the product lifecycle.
Thermodynamics: it's hard to unmix cake batter.
The concept of Recycling ( nearly all the materials can be reused with little cost or impact) is a myth. There are relatively few consumer products or materials that are readily recycled.
It's not so much that electronics are unrecyclable, it's that nearly everything is unrecyclable.
Recycling is nearly a fantasy. For the most part it has been a campaign for waste management firms to charge customers double while demanding they separate their own garbage, and punish them for doing it wrong. The charade lasted so long because much of the "recycling" was dumped in Asia and ended up in the ocean from there.
Did you know only about 5% of plastic in the US is recycled? The rest is floating in the ocean or not degrading in landfills.
Plastic.
not sure why this has been downvoted. The real answer is "nothing is".
Recycling works best when you have a big lump of bulk material which can be melted down and reforged/recast. Aluminum cans are some of the best objects for recycling because apart from the labels they are almost pure aluminum, and so you just toss them in a furnace and get the constituent material back.
Electronics are the exact opposite of this: they’re highly heterogenous, with bits of material scattered all over the place. Also, most of that material isn’t particularly valuable: silicon is literally as abundant as sand. So all you can really do is melt it all into slag or dissolve it in acid and then try to extract the trace amounts of valuable bits like gold, but this is so energy-intensive for so little material that it’s not worth it at any reasonable material price.
repairability would help quite a bit. How many times do you have to replace an entire board in something when replacing just a component would actually fix things?
recyclable and reusable aren’t profitable for companies. They want you hooked on buying the latest incremental/minute change.
If companies like Apple cared truly cared about the environment. We would have phones, laptops with easily repairable and upgradeable hardware.
Framework is the closest we have come to having a thin profile laptop and easily repairable and upgradeable hardware.
bluntly: a lack of regulation mandating that consumer goods manufacturing responsibilities cover the lifecycle of the goods (including end-of-life).
yes i'm fully aware that recycling components is difficult and costly; if you truly believe in the market as an innovating force, you could stand to be a little more optimistic that we could make this a reality :)
You obviously are not in manufacturing.
USB-C charger reuse is now common (Apple chargers still gets the UK/EU law exemption)
RoHS prevents Pb content in recycled parts (less toxic waste)
Lithium battery recycling drop bins are next to the store entrance (financial incentives)
ATX12V/EPS12V power supply in your PC is a standard component between motherboards
Aluminum and steel instead of plastics is common (consumers like the aesthetics too)
Under the guise of recycling, problems arise when third-world people use vats of acid to strip trace gold/platinum from electronics. Others strip, relabel (laser marking), and resell aged chips as new stock... this can cause safety/reliability problems.
Some firms now use solder centrifuges to extract RoHS solder off parts, and resell the tin bar-solder back to manufacturers.
e-Waste can be a desirable resource, but few people want old Lead contaminated CRT or mixed plastic filled with inserts etc.
Companies like AMD with AM5 compatibility across chip generations should get an award for their great work reducing waste. Linux <6.0.8 kept a lot of laptops out of the landfills too, but now kernel >6.0.15 will no longer support old GPU/Laptops as NVIDIA ends legacy driver support. =3