21 ms·

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

170 points by sonabinu 8y ago

netman21 8y ago
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 reuse. They clean and test the phones, grade them, and sell them on. The non-working ones can have their parts salvaged. The true scrap is sent on to smelters to extract the valuable stuff and dispose of the rest responsibly. Most follow the Responsible Recycling (R2) standard. Some things like cathode ray tube glass has a negative value, meaning you have to pay someone to dispose of it.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- walrus01 8y ago
  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.
  - azernik 8y ago
    The article mentions a mostly-automated setup - which is why it focuses on metal recycling, which is probably easier to automate than component reuse.
  - kwiens 8y ago
    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-refining-set-to-close-down/ https://resource-recycling.com/e-scrap/2018/07/03/ecs-refini...
    - walrus01 8y ago
      I remember seeing this a few years ago: https://theintercept.com/2016/05/10/gps-tracking-devices-catch-major-u-s-recyclers-in-improper-e-waste-exports/ https://theintercept.com/2016/05/10/gps-tracking-devices-cat... http://www.ban.org/trash-transparency/ http://www.ban.org/trash-transparency/
    - MisterOctober 8y ago
      ^ 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.
  - guywithaphone 8y ago
    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.
  - MisterOctober 8y ago
    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
  - iamgopal 8y ago
    Believe it or not but 1USD per hour is not poor country. Poor country be like 1 USD per day.
    - danieltillett 8y ago
      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.
      - bodas 8y ago
        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.
      - coldtea 8y ago
        You'd be surprised: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_count...
        danieltillett 8y ago
        Wage rates are not the same as wage costs.
      - DanBC 8y ago
        About 80% of the world lives on less that $10 per day, and about half live on less than $2.50 per day.
        danieltillett 8y ago
        Yes, but how many live on $1 a day.
  - morganvachon 8y ago
    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.
CodeCube 8y ago
Someone is gonna be rich
chris_va 8y ago
Obligatory How It's Made on gold recycling from e-waste: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Sp6Qhe1i8Y&t=3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Sp6Qhe1i8Y&t=3s
esturk 8y ago
Interesting they mentioned Apple's Daisy. I feel that Apple gets an unfair amount of criticism for their lack of ewaste initiatives but none or very little is attributed to other smartphone OEMs like Samsung.
- cptskippy 8y ago
  Most of the attention stems from organizations like Greenpeace which tend to attack high profile targets in ways that are as much self serving as they are beneficial if not more so. * Regarding Daisy, I'd be curious to hear how it handles damaged iPhones. Can it and to what degree? What percentage of iPhones can be recycled by it? I fear that any iPhone that's compromised won't be recycled out of concern for breaking the recycling machine.
rrggrr 8y ago
This ship sailed. Its generally accepted that e-scrap processor's margins are 15% or less. Its not just the cost to access/buy the materials that keeps margins low. The CAPEX costs are enormous, there are large operating costs, and regulatory compliance is also very expensive. Further complicating matters is government flip-flopping on mandated electronic scrap collection regulations that make it tough for business to predict future returns on investment. Add to that the volatility of the commodities markets and its no easy task to make a profit these days in electronic scrap. Nobody is getting rich of e-scrap that doesn't already have a foot or other appendage in the game.
- gascan 8y ago
  Isn't 15% a pretty good margin? Restaurants & retail make low single digit margins.
  - rrggrr 8y ago
    On a risk adjusted basis, no. You're buying the raw material assuming aluminum heat sinks will be .67/lb, only to discover that by the time you've liberated the Al from the stream the price has dropped to .40/lb. That just happened. Or, you've invested $30m - $100m in an Ontario e-scrap plant assuming the CADGOV won't reverse its e-scrap policy. Then it does essentially that and the market you thought you had has changed dramatically. That happened.
    - 21 8y ago
      > assuming aluminum heat sinks will be .67/lb, only to discover that by the time you've liberated the Al from the stream the price has dropped to .40/lb Maybe you can use a financial hedging contract to lock in the price of alu?
      - recycledmatt 8y ago
        Typically the volumes are relatively small, which makes it’s expensive to hedge. It’s a penny game. If you are making a 35% spread on your buy/sell the one time inventory depreciation will definitely hurt, but your spread and net pennies per pound has also gone down substantially as well.
fuball63 8y ago
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 on here about cheap web host providers using consumer grade boxes as servers. With today's cluster technologies, there's certainly creative applications for processing power that would end up in a landfill. [1] https://www.maketecheasier.com/why-cpu-clock-speed-isnt-increasing/ https://www.maketecheasier.com/why-cpu-clock-speed-isnt-incr...
- bahmboo 8y ago
  Power consumption is going down with each gen and is big cost driver. Also heat dissipation in data centers is costly. Gotta consider TCO in these cases.
  - gascan 8y ago
    Semiconductors are fairly unique in this regard- power consumption has been going down so quickly for so long, it can often be both uneconomical and environmentally unfriendly to continue to operate older hardware.
    - adrianN 8y ago
      I'd like to see a detailed calculation. Teaching sand how to think doesn't sound like an environmentally friendly process.
      - gascan 8y ago
        Embodied environmental impact is a difficult calculation, and nobody ever agrees on a number for any complex product like semiconductors, cars, solar panels. But, if we one day price in all the externalities, we can count on the markets to run the numbers for us. If anything, electricity production probably has more subsidies & externalities than semiconductor manufacture.
ape4 8y ago
When its time to upgrade the ewaste extracting robot, its child will mine their parents.
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  You're dark, I love it.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Ultimately, that's how life works. When an organism dies, it is taken apart and its basic building blocks are reused by others.
Scaevolus 8y ago
Recycling individual components is profitable with sufficiently low wages. Here's Bunnie Huang talking about that: https://youtu.be/y5QkM2Work0?t=1464 https://youtu.be/y5QkM2Work0?t=1464 You can make a reasonably good living in Shenzhen by reselling expensive chips from discarded hardware.
Bucephalus355 8y ago
Literally just met someone for the first time yesterday who is moving to Texas to do this. Apparently, the refresh rate for cloud data centers is now getting down to 2 years or less. Easier to expand by replacing instead of leasing new space. This, combined with how environmentally conscious the big cloud companies are, has led to a big demand in IT Asset Disposal services. Also obviously there are security aspects in play here. In PW Singer’s novel about war with China, pretty sure this was a big plot point when imports of microchips stopped and regular citizens had to donate their iPads and what not to be stripped of valuable material.
- lostlogin 8y ago
  > moving to Texas to do this. Why Texas? Are there lots of data centres there? If so, is that an energy cost thing, because it seems a place with greater cooling requirements?
  - icelancer 8y ago
    >> Are there lots of data centres there? Lots of DCs and general IT work available there. Austin is a burgeoning tech city.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    Texas has been big with datacenters for a long time. Apparently some tax exemptions may be involved, as well as good access to a lot of power. https://www.dallasnews.com/news/news/2015/07/10/data-centers-an-absolute-gold-mine-for-north-texas-cities https://www.dallasnews.com/news/news/2015/07/10/data-centers...
  - recycledmatt 8y ago
    Great tax environment for running a reseller.
- rasz 8y ago
  This makes zero sense, you can easily resell 2-5 year old server hardware at x10-100 raw material worth.
guywithaphone 8y ago
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 refurb or parts, then the sale, then support for the items you sold. While there are a LOT of parts in closets, basements or other storage, it is difficult to obtain products that have a high resale value at the right price. Then factor in that newer computers and phones are getting much faster and/or using less power. Also, recycling does have risks-- including dust, toxic fires, and safe disposal. It's not impossible to make money recycling/refurbishing, but it is difficult and usually requires scale.
- nerdponx 8y ago
  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.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    >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 the financial value of their used stuff and that hinders reuse in favour of replacement.
    - tajen 8y ago
      « 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 actual people capable of repairing anything. I’ve never seen one actually repairing an appliance. I have my doubt whether it’s really the machines getting built in such a way that repairs are impossible, oftentimes it does seem like a little more search could have found the defective wire, but let’s be honest, if they want to survive in a big city, soldering won’t pay enough. And that’s where the economy is surprising. Somehow those repairman jobs have higher hourly rates than replacing the machine, meaning shipping a new 50-kg appliance across the world is less costly than shipping a repairman across New York.
alkonaut 8y ago
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?
- rasz 8y ago
  craigslist
- guywithaphone 8y ago
  Metal recyclers are in every major and many minor cities. EBay also has a thriving gold recycling community. Search "Gold scrap"
- Symbiote 8y ago
  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/ https://sweden.se/nature/the-swedish-recycling-revolution/
- slededit 8y ago
  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.
JoblessWonder 8y ago
I work across the street from one in California and they do a ton of business. Lots of trucks dropping stuff off daily, which they weigh and charge.
dlhavema 8y ago
doesn't this process involve lots of nasty chemicals to extract the precious metals from circuit boards and the like? i saw an article on Hackady[0] about this a while back [0] - https://hackaday.com/2013/11/18/salvaging-gold-from-old-electronics/ https://hackaday.com/2013/11/18/salvaging-gold-from-old-elec...
peterburkimsher 8y ago
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 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.
- abhishekjha 8y ago
  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?
  - peterburkimsher 8y ago
    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!
aurizon 8y ago
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.
vultour 8y ago
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.
coldtea 8y ago
If 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".

170 points by sonabinu 8y ago

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 reuse. They clean and test the phones, grade them, and sell them on. The non-working ones can have their parts salvaged. The true scrap is sent on to smelters to extract the valuable stuff and dispose of the rest responsibly. Most follow the Responsible Recycling (R2) standard. Some things like cathode ray tube glass has a negative value, meaning you have to pay someone to dispose of it.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
walrus01 8y ago
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.
- azernik 8y ago
  The article mentions a mostly-automated setup - which is why it focuses on metal recycling, which is probably easier to automate than component reuse.
- kwiens 8y ago
  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-refining-set-to-close-down/ https://resource-recycling.com/e-scrap/2018/07/03/ecs-refini...
  - walrus01 8y ago
    I remember seeing this a few years ago: https://theintercept.com/2016/05/10/gps-tracking-devices-catch-major-u-s-recyclers-in-improper-e-waste-exports/ https://theintercept.com/2016/05/10/gps-tracking-devices-cat... http://www.ban.org/trash-transparency/ http://www.ban.org/trash-transparency/
  - MisterOctober 8y ago
    ^ 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.
- guywithaphone 8y ago
  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.
- MisterOctober 8y ago
  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
- iamgopal 8y ago
  Believe it or not but 1USD per hour is not poor country. Poor country be like 1 USD per day.
  - danieltillett 8y ago
    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.
    - bodas 8y ago
      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.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      You'd be surprised: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_count...
      - danieltillett 8y ago
        Wage rates are not the same as wage costs.
    - DanBC 8y ago
      About 80% of the world lives on less that $10 per day, and about half live on less than $2.50 per day.
      - danieltillett 8y ago
        Yes, but how many live on $1 a day.
- morganvachon 8y ago
  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.

CodeCube 8y ago

Someone is gonna be rich

chris_va 8y ago

Obligatory How It's Made on gold recycling from e-waste: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Sp6Qhe1i8Y&t=3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Sp6Qhe1i8Y&t=3s

esturk 8y ago

Interesting they mentioned Apple's Daisy. I feel that Apple gets an unfair amount of criticism for their lack of ewaste initiatives but none or very little is attributed to other smartphone OEMs like Samsung.

cptskippy 8y ago
Most of the attention stems from organizations like Greenpeace which tend to attack high profile targets in ways that are as much self serving as they are beneficial if not more so. * Regarding Daisy, I'd be curious to hear how it handles damaged iPhones. Can it and to what degree? What percentage of iPhones can be recycled by it? I fear that any iPhone that's compromised won't be recycled out of concern for breaking the recycling machine.

rrggrr 8y ago

This ship sailed. Its generally accepted that e-scrap processor's margins are 15% or less. Its not just the cost to access/buy the materials that keeps margins low. The CAPEX costs are enormous, there are large operating costs, and regulatory compliance is also very expensive. Further complicating matters is government flip-flopping on mandated electronic scrap collection regulations that make it tough for business to predict future returns on investment. Add to that the volatility of the commodities markets and its no easy task to make a profit these days in electronic scrap. Nobody is getting rich of e-scrap that doesn't already have a foot or other appendage in the game.

gascan 8y ago
Isn't 15% a pretty good margin? Restaurants & retail make low single digit margins.
- rrggrr 8y ago
  On a risk adjusted basis, no. You're buying the raw material assuming aluminum heat sinks will be .67/lb, only to discover that by the time you've liberated the Al from the stream the price has dropped to .40/lb. That just happened. Or, you've invested $30m - $100m in an Ontario e-scrap plant assuming the CADGOV won't reverse its e-scrap policy. Then it does essentially that and the market you thought you had has changed dramatically. That happened.
  - 21 8y ago
    > assuming aluminum heat sinks will be .67/lb, only to discover that by the time you've liberated the Al from the stream the price has dropped to .40/lb Maybe you can use a financial hedging contract to lock in the price of alu?
    - recycledmatt 8y ago
      Typically the volumes are relatively small, which makes it’s expensive to hedge. It’s a penny game. If you are making a 35% spread on your buy/sell the one time inventory depreciation will definitely hurt, but your spread and net pennies per pound has also gone down substantially as well.

fuball63 8y ago

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 on here about cheap web host providers using consumer grade boxes as servers. With today's cluster technologies, there's certainly creative applications for processing power that would end up in a landfill. [1] https://www.maketecheasier.com/why-cpu-clock-speed-isnt-increasing/ https://www.maketecheasier.com/why-cpu-clock-speed-isnt-incr...

bahmboo 8y ago
Power consumption is going down with each gen and is big cost driver. Also heat dissipation in data centers is costly. Gotta consider TCO in these cases.
- gascan 8y ago
  Semiconductors are fairly unique in this regard- power consumption has been going down so quickly for so long, it can often be both uneconomical and environmentally unfriendly to continue to operate older hardware.
  - adrianN 8y ago
    I'd like to see a detailed calculation. Teaching sand how to think doesn't sound like an environmentally friendly process.
    - gascan 8y ago
      Embodied environmental impact is a difficult calculation, and nobody ever agrees on a number for any complex product like semiconductors, cars, solar panels. But, if we one day price in all the externalities, we can count on the markets to run the numbers for us. If anything, electricity production probably has more subsidies & externalities than semiconductor manufacture.

ape4 8y ago

When its time to upgrade the ewaste extracting robot, its child will mine their parents.

ryanmercer 8y ago
You're dark, I love it.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
Ultimately, that's how life works. When an organism dies, it is taken apart and its basic building blocks are reused by others.

Scaevolus 8y ago

Recycling individual components is profitable with sufficiently low wages. Here's Bunnie Huang talking about that: https://youtu.be/y5QkM2Work0?t=1464 https://youtu.be/y5QkM2Work0?t=1464 You can make a reasonably good living in Shenzhen by reselling expensive chips from discarded hardware.

Bucephalus355 8y ago

Literally just met someone for the first time yesterday who is moving to Texas to do this. Apparently, the refresh rate for cloud data centers is now getting down to 2 years or less. Easier to expand by replacing instead of leasing new space. This, combined with how environmentally conscious the big cloud companies are, has led to a big demand in IT Asset Disposal services. Also obviously there are security aspects in play here. In PW Singer’s novel about war with China, pretty sure this was a big plot point when imports of microchips stopped and regular citizens had to donate their iPads and what not to be stripped of valuable material.

lostlogin 8y ago
> moving to Texas to do this. Why Texas? Are there lots of data centres there? If so, is that an energy cost thing, because it seems a place with greater cooling requirements?
- icelancer 8y ago
  >> Are there lots of data centres there? Lots of DCs and general IT work available there. Austin is a burgeoning tech city.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  Texas has been big with datacenters for a long time. Apparently some tax exemptions may be involved, as well as good access to a lot of power. https://www.dallasnews.com/news/news/2015/07/10/data-centers-an-absolute-gold-mine-for-north-texas-cities https://www.dallasnews.com/news/news/2015/07/10/data-centers...
- recycledmatt 8y ago
  Great tax environment for running a reseller.
rasz 8y ago
This makes zero sense, you can easily resell 2-5 year old server hardware at x10-100 raw material worth.

guywithaphone 8y ago

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 refurb or parts, then the sale, then support for the items you sold. While there are a LOT of parts in closets, basements or other storage, it is difficult to obtain products that have a high resale value at the right price. Then factor in that newer computers and phones are getting much faster and/or using less power. Also, recycling does have risks-- including dust, toxic fires, and safe disposal. It's not impossible to make money recycling/refurbishing, but it is difficult and usually requires scale.

nerdponx 8y ago
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.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  >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 the financial value of their used stuff and that hinders reuse in favour of replacement.
  - tajen 8y ago
    « 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 actual people capable of repairing anything. I’ve never seen one actually repairing an appliance. I have my doubt whether it’s really the machines getting built in such a way that repairs are impossible, oftentimes it does seem like a little more search could have found the defective wire, but let’s be honest, if they want to survive in a big city, soldering won’t pay enough. And that’s where the economy is surprising. Somehow those repairman jobs have higher hourly rates than replacing the machine, meaning shipping a new 50-kg appliance across the world is less costly than shipping a repairman across New York.

alkonaut 8y ago

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?

rasz 8y ago
craigslist
guywithaphone 8y ago
Metal recyclers are in every major and many minor cities. EBay also has a thriving gold recycling community. Search "Gold scrap"
Symbiote 8y ago
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/ https://sweden.se/nature/the-swedish-recycling-revolution/
slededit 8y ago
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.

JoblessWonder 8y ago

I work across the street from one in California and they do a ton of business. Lots of trucks dropping stuff off daily, which they weigh and charge.

dlhavema 8y ago

doesn't this process involve lots of nasty chemicals to extract the precious metals from circuit boards and the like? i saw an article on Hackady[0] about this a while back [0] - https://hackaday.com/2013/11/18/salvaging-gold-from-old-electronics/ https://hackaday.com/2013/11/18/salvaging-gold-from-old-elec...

peterburkimsher 8y ago

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 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.

abhishekjha 8y ago
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?
- peterburkimsher 8y ago
  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!

aurizon 8y ago

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.

vultour 8y ago

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.

coldtea 8y ago

If 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".