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This is scary to think about given that you need rare earth elements to build those chips powering all those machines. Makes sense why some countries are ensuri
by lalos 6y ago
This is scary to think about given that you need rare earth elements to build those chips powering all those machines. Makes sense why some countries are ensuring to have a supply on this in the long term, feels like the new oil.
- mc32 6y agoAt least they are recoverable and recyclable, oil not so much.
- CogitoCogito 6y agoAre they? If you have a pile of 1,000,000 chips, can you really get any of the elements out at reasonable (by almost any metric) cost?
- SpaceRaccoon 6y agoWhy would it be more difficult than to extract from ore? You can smelt them, that will burn away the plastic, and then you can separate the metals.
- CogitoCogito 6y agoI'm honestly having a bit of trouble putting my misgiving into thoughts (which if anything demonstrates I haven't thought this all through), but if you throw together say 10 materials, how likely are you to be able to separate out those 10 materials again? Or will you only be able to separate a couple metals with certain convenient melting points? I do see what you're saying though. Maybe the easy question is, what actually happens when electronics are recycled today? How much of the original material is retrieved? Maybe I'm just entirely wrong even given the state of the art today?
- rurp 6y agoI only know a bit about this but from what I understand this is similar to how most modern mining works. Many minerals are mined in very low concentrations, which means they then need to be extracted out of the host material. Part of that process often involves multiple steps where the ore is soaked in various chemical solutions, which separate certain materials. It can be a very complicated process involving a lot of toxic chemicals.
- dodobirdlord 6y agoThe rare earth metals are kinda irritating to separate because they have very similar physical properties, but it obviously can be done. They frequently co-occur in ore deposits for exactly that reason.
- blacksmith_tb 6y agoGold is recovered in significant quantities from e-waste[1] 1: https://www.thebalancesmb.com/electronic-devices-source-of-metals-for-recyclers-2877986 https://www.thebalancesmb.com/electronic-devices-source-of-m...
- CogitoCogito 6y agoOnce the gold has been recovered, are they still able to recover other metals? I don't mean this antagonistically, this is a serious question (in case you know).
- blacksmith_tb 6y agoGood question, but I don't know the answer - my sense is the bigger problem is the recycling tends to happen at low rates, and often involve nasty pollution/byproducts[1] 1: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/02/10bn-precious-metals-dumped-each-year-electronic-waste-un-toxic-e-waste-polluting https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/02/10bn-pre...
- formerly_proven 6y agoCommercial chips still use gold bond wires (except flip chips), but that's fairly little. Apart from that it's just copper or aluminium for the metal layers, a bunch of silicon and a bunch of silica dust bound with some epoxy resin. Most of this isn't worth anything to reuse.
- DoofusOfDeath 6y agoIt sounds like you may hold a common misconception about rare-earth minerals. IIUC, they're not (extremely) rare in the traditional sense; it's more that it's hard to economically extract them from ore. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element#:~:text=The%2017%20rare%2Dearth%20elements,%2C%20and%20yttrium%20(Y) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element#:~:text=The....
- pydry 6y agoEven harder and even more expensive to extract if you give a damn about the environment.
- DoofusOfDeath 6y agoGood point! Your comment has made me curious about the total lifecycle of the waste products from these processes.
- paulcole 6y agoThis is an unpopular opinion here on HN but essentially everything the largest nations have done show that they don't give a damn about the environment at all. Like my dad said, "when someone shows you who they are, believe them."
- clairity 6y agoyour two sentences led to some cognitive dissonance... yes, institutions like governments can be amoral/immoral on longer timescales (in fact, i'd posit institutions are employed specifically for this purpose), but people rarely exhibit such attributes statically, as your dad's quote alludes. it's at best "believe them in the moment". rare is the "bad" person; more common is the "bad" institution. expect the best of people (which is not the same as "be naïve").
- paulcole 6y agoIt doesn't matter if the people are bad or the institution is bad. The end result is the same: > everything the largest nations have done show that they don't give a damn about the environment at all. I do expect the best of people. It's just been shown that the "best" a very large group of people can do re: climate change is pretty fucking pathetic.
- pfdietz 6y agoYou need rare earth elements to make chips? Name one. And it had better be a rare earth, not something that is just rare and comes from the Earth. (slight amounts of REEs are used in amplifiers in optical fibers, and also in permanent magnets, but those aren't what you were talking about)
- sabujp 6y agohttps://semiengineering.com/more-rare-earth-rumblings/#:~:text=They%20include%20scandium%2C%20yttrium%2C%20lanthanum,%2C%20thulium%2C%20ytterbium%20and%20lutetium https://semiengineering.com/more-rare-earth-rumblings/#:~:te....
- pfdietz 6y agoNowhere does that say that REEs are used in chips.
- boogies 6y agoNot as scary as the fact that Alphabet pressures local governments to let them drain aquifers to cool the machines¹, and powers them using vast swaths of bulldozed former habitats of endangered desert tortoises and focused beams of light that literally burn alive thousands of birds, including threatened predators². 1: https://www.postandcourier.com/news/google-s-controversial-groundwater-withdrawal-sparks-question-of-who-owns/article_bed9179c-1baa-11e7-983e-03d6b33a01e7.html https://www.postandcourier.com/news/google-s-controversial-g... 2: https://www.sbsun.com/2014/08/18/emerging-solar-plants-in-mojave-desert-scorch-birds-in-mid-air/ https://www.sbsun.com/2014/08/18/emerging-solar-plants-in-mo... "Once built, U.S. government biologists found the plant's superheated mirrors were killing birds. In April, biologists working for the state estimated that 3,500 birds died at Ivanpah in the span of a year, many of them burned alive while flying through a part of the solar installment where air temperatures can reach 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit." — https://www.wsj.com/articles/high-tech-solar-projects-fail-to-deliver-1434138485 https://www.wsj.com/articles/high-tech-solar-projects-fail-t... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility#Birds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility#B...
- robotnikman 6y agoThats just one of their datacenters?! Thats huge!
- boogies 6y agoThe aquifer draining article linked is about one in South Carolina, the Ivanpah plant is in California's Mojave Desert, and IIUC is the largest bird incinerator in the world, burning a bird out of the sky every other minute. From the Sun article: Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the plant’s concentrated sun rays — “streamers,” for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair. Federal wildlife investigators who visited the BrightSource Energy plant last year and watched as birds burned and fell, reporting an average of one “streamer” every two minutes, are urging California officials to halt the operator’s application to build a still-bigger version. They do seem to have reduced some of the more dramatic deaths by unfocusing the beams when the plant is idle and clearing even more land around it to keep birds away, although there were still thousands of deaths every year afterwards.