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This strikes me as particularly eco-unfriendly. All that shipping has a high carbon footprint, and nearly everyone in an urban area has nearby recycling firms w

This strikes me as particularly eco-unfriendly. All that shipping has a high carbon footprint, and nearly everyone in an urban area has nearby recycling firms who love to get their hands on lots of electronics. In fact, eyeing my garage right now and thinking that perhaps I should make another run next weekend.

kragen 15y ago
On the off chance that you posted this seriously instead of as a troll (which is frowned upon here), recycling electronics generally produces a lot of toxic waste and uses an enormous amount of energy, manufacturing the new electronics also produces toxic waste and uses an enormous amount of energy, and the new electronics still have to be shipped, usually internationally by air. By contrast, the carbon cost of shipping ten grams of electronics is minuscule. A little multiplication: a forty-foot truckload is about 26500 kg, a truck gets about 10 miles per gallon of diesel, and diesel is about twelve fourteenths carbon by weight, and about 0.83 g/cc. 12/14 * 0.83 g/cc / (10 miles per gallon) / 26500 kg = 1.12 × 10⁻⁸ tons of carbon emitted per kilogram mile. So if you were to ship ten grams of electronic components from New York to San Francisco, the carbon footprint would be about ¼ gram of carbon for the long-distance part of the trip.
- kylemaxwell 15y ago
  Thanks for the clarification. And yes, I was serious, not trolling.
prodigal_erik 15y ago
Are you sure they love it? I've had to pay them to let me leave stuff, and there are frequent claims that rather than local recycling, most of it is snuck away into landfills in China (where some of it might be scrounged for components or raw material).
jdietrich 15y ago
Electronics recycling splits into two halves. One is the 'recycling' of old but saleable equipment, mainly old cellphones and computers. These generally end up on eBay, or shipped out to Africa to be sold on. I suppose if you're too lazy or rich to sell your electronics yourself, this is perfectly harmless. The other half is the actual recycling of broken or obsolete equipment that is valuable only as scrap. The processing of this waste is arguably the biggest environmental disaster happening anywhere in the world. This waste is shipped out to places like Guiyu and Lagos, where it is sorted by hand. PCBs will be burned on open fires to remove the solder mask, then dipped in acid to extract the gold and copper. Wire insulation is burned off and plastic housings incinerated in the street. Toner dust is blown into the air. Anything which will not burn and has no scrap value is dumped in fields. In Guiyu, levels of lead, mercury and cadmium in the water course are hundreds of times the safe limit. Drinking water is brought in by tanker. Regardless of how careful a recycler is, they have no ability to control how equipment is resold. A bundle of waste might change hands half a dozen times before finally becoming scrap metal. I'd much rather see old equipment end up in EPA-regulated landfill than be "recycled".

kragen 15y ago

On the off chance that you posted this seriously instead of as a troll (which is frowned upon here), recycling electronics generally produces a lot of toxic waste and uses an enormous amount of energy, manufacturing the new electronics also produces toxic waste and uses an enormous amount of energy, and the new electronics still have to be shipped, usually internationally by air. By contrast, the carbon cost of shipping ten grams of electronics is minuscule. A little multiplication: a forty-foot truckload is about 26500 kg, a truck gets about 10 miles per gallon of diesel, and diesel is about twelve fourteenths carbon by weight, and about 0.83 g/cc. 12/14 * 0.83 g/cc / (10 miles per gallon) / 26500 kg = 1.12 × 10⁻⁸ tons of carbon emitted per kilogram mile. So if you were to ship ten grams of electronic components from New York to San Francisco, the carbon footprint would be about ¼ gram of carbon for the long-distance part of the trip.

kylemaxwell 15y ago
Thanks for the clarification. And yes, I was serious, not trolling.

prodigal_erik 15y ago

Are you sure they love it? I've had to pay them to let me leave stuff, and there are frequent claims that rather than local recycling, most of it is snuck away into landfills in China (where some of it might be scrounged for components or raw material).

jdietrich 15y ago

Electronics recycling splits into two halves. One is the 'recycling' of old but saleable equipment, mainly old cellphones and computers. These generally end up on eBay, or shipped out to Africa to be sold on. I suppose if you're too lazy or rich to sell your electronics yourself, this is perfectly harmless. The other half is the actual recycling of broken or obsolete equipment that is valuable only as scrap. The processing of this waste is arguably the biggest environmental disaster happening anywhere in the world. This waste is shipped out to places like Guiyu and Lagos, where it is sorted by hand. PCBs will be burned on open fires to remove the solder mask, then dipped in acid to extract the gold and copper. Wire insulation is burned off and plastic housings incinerated in the street. Toner dust is blown into the air. Anything which will not burn and has no scrap value is dumped in fields. In Guiyu, levels of lead, mercury and cadmium in the water course are hundreds of times the safe limit. Drinking water is brought in by tanker. Regardless of how careful a recycler is, they have no ability to control how equipment is resold. A bundle of waste might change hands half a dozen times before finally becoming scrap metal. I'd much rather see old equipment end up in EPA-regulated landfill than be "recycled".