4 ms·

What I don't get is there's millions of "good enough" e-waste motherboards, RAM, CPUs etc. out there. Wouldn't recycling be better than having nothing or waitin

What I don't get is there's millions of "good enough" e-waste motherboards, RAM, CPUs etc. out there. Wouldn't recycling be better than having nothing or waiting indefinitely? Are there that many workloads that can only run on brand new hardware?

fipar 4y ago
I think that's a good idea but then companies doing that wouldn't be able to sell their products as new, and we probably need a cultural shift before widespread adoption of refurbished and used products is doable. Additionally, and not knowing much about the hardware side of things, if I put myself in the shoes of a manufacturer, it seems challenging to ship a product where the expected lifetime of some of its components is unknown. Support and warranties would be affected too.
- mysterydip 4y ago
  Those are fair points. With the amount of e-waste currently in existence I'd think we would want to address those sooner rather than later, but it's easy for everyone to just kick the can down the road.
  - galleywest200 4y ago
    It may be more prudent for us to perfect our material extraction process to reuse these metals and plastics, as opposed to reusing the same piece of hardware. Once that is done, we could probably have e-cycling be picked up by trash collectors just like regular recycling.
cptskippy 4y ago
You can't really slap an AT motherboard in an LED light bulb and call it a day. Fabs produce all manner of chips, not just GPUs and CPUs. Over the last 40 years all manner of circuits composed of discrete components have been replaced with chips. Voltage regulation is a chip, battery protection is a chip, rectification is a chip.
- mysterydip 4y ago
  Good point. What about repurposing FPGAs?
  - crote 4y ago
    Barely anyone uses FPGAs. They are pretty much only in use in highly specialized enterprise-grade hardware. Think a €5000 SSL accelerator.
  - tverbeure 4y ago
    For many FPGAs, the cost of the additional power supply controllers will be more than the cost of a full microcontroller solution.
  - cptskippy 4y ago
    Not all Chips are digital logic. In fact most are not. An FPGA is reprogrammable logic. You can not replace a rectifier or regulator with an FPGA. That's kind of like suggesting someone use a stapler (not a staple) when they need a lag bolt because "well they're both steel".
Consultant32452 4y ago
I feel like this could be reasonable for boutique production, but if you're dumpster diving it may be difficult to order millions of exactly the same part this way.
crote 4y ago
It depends. First of all, we aren't really talking about motherboards or CPUs here. It is embedded electronics, not desktop computing. They are highly specialized application-specific electronics, which require a lot of engineering time to design, validate, and certify. It is nothing at all like the computer ecosystem, where you can just swap in a different motherboard. Boards are designed to use very specific chips, with a chip swap easily costing tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Second, the chip shortage is mostly affecting "legacy" chips - which have often been available for a decade or more. The applications they are being used in do not really require a lot of processing power, but they do need to be extremely reliable. We are talking about things like Atmel's ATmega32u4, which was initially released in 2008. Can't really do a lot, but plenty of power for some obscure automotive module. Although recycling is technically sort-of possible, it is extremely labor-intensive. Even with the current shortage and associated price hike, it isn't really economically viable. Even worse, the resulting chips are of unknown quality: you simply don't know what happened to them! And exhaustively testing them isn't really possible either. Are you willing to buy a car with an airbag controller which contains a chip they dug out of a landfill? Newly manufactured hardware has a known quality, which means you can guarantee it works properly. On the other hand, we are wasting a lot of opportunities on the other side of the usage cycle. Electronics can often be repaired, but we throw them away instead. Look at smartphone and laptop manufacturers, for example: often they just throw out an entire logic board when a single chip is defective. A skilled technician could replace that chip, but smartphone and laptop manufacturers are actively trying to obstruct this. It is "reduce, reuse, recycle" for a reason: recycling should be the the last resort - not the first.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  > Electronics can often be repaired, but we throw them away instead. A skilled technician replacing a 2¢ part on a $10 board costs more than a new $10 board. Just disassembling that board to recycle parts off of it will cost more than the board originally cost to manufacture. You also run into the same argument against landfill airbag controllers. A factory that produces a million boards can have very good reliability metrics. A skilled technician not only has more variable output but less accurate quality metrics unless they put a lot of extra effort into process controls. A recycled board will cost more and be statistically less reliable from a brand new board. It would be more efficient to just mechanically separate them to extract raw materials.

fipar 4y ago

I think that's a good idea but then companies doing that wouldn't be able to sell their products as new, and we probably need a cultural shift before widespread adoption of refurbished and used products is doable. Additionally, and not knowing much about the hardware side of things, if I put myself in the shoes of a manufacturer, it seems challenging to ship a product where the expected lifetime of some of its components is unknown. Support and warranties would be affected too.

mysterydip 4y ago
Those are fair points. With the amount of e-waste currently in existence I'd think we would want to address those sooner rather than later, but it's easy for everyone to just kick the can down the road.
- galleywest200 4y ago
  It may be more prudent for us to perfect our material extraction process to reuse these metals and plastics, as opposed to reusing the same piece of hardware. Once that is done, we could probably have e-cycling be picked up by trash collectors just like regular recycling.

cptskippy 4y ago

You can't really slap an AT motherboard in an LED light bulb and call it a day. Fabs produce all manner of chips, not just GPUs and CPUs. Over the last 40 years all manner of circuits composed of discrete components have been replaced with chips. Voltage regulation is a chip, battery protection is a chip, rectification is a chip.

mysterydip 4y ago
Good point. What about repurposing FPGAs?
- crote 4y ago
  Barely anyone uses FPGAs. They are pretty much only in use in highly specialized enterprise-grade hardware. Think a €5000 SSL accelerator.
- tverbeure 4y ago
  For many FPGAs, the cost of the additional power supply controllers will be more than the cost of a full microcontroller solution.
- cptskippy 4y ago
  Not all Chips are digital logic. In fact most are not. An FPGA is reprogrammable logic. You can not replace a rectifier or regulator with an FPGA. That's kind of like suggesting someone use a stapler (not a staple) when they need a lag bolt because "well they're both steel".

Consultant32452 4y ago

I feel like this could be reasonable for boutique production, but if you're dumpster diving it may be difficult to order millions of exactly the same part this way.

crote 4y ago

It depends. First of all, we aren't really talking about motherboards or CPUs here. It is embedded electronics, not desktop computing. They are highly specialized application-specific electronics, which require a lot of engineering time to design, validate, and certify. It is nothing at all like the computer ecosystem, where you can just swap in a different motherboard. Boards are designed to use very specific chips, with a chip swap easily costing tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Second, the chip shortage is mostly affecting "legacy" chips - which have often been available for a decade or more. The applications they are being used in do not really require a lot of processing power, but they do need to be extremely reliable. We are talking about things like Atmel's ATmega32u4, which was initially released in 2008. Can't really do a lot, but plenty of power for some obscure automotive module. Although recycling is technically sort-of possible, it is extremely labor-intensive. Even with the current shortage and associated price hike, it isn't really economically viable. Even worse, the resulting chips are of unknown quality: you simply don't know what happened to them! And exhaustively testing them isn't really possible either. Are you willing to buy a car with an airbag controller which contains a chip they dug out of a landfill? Newly manufactured hardware has a known quality, which means you can guarantee it works properly. On the other hand, we are wasting a lot of opportunities on the other side of the usage cycle. Electronics can often be repaired, but we throw them away instead. Look at smartphone and laptop manufacturers, for example: often they just throw out an entire logic board when a single chip is defective. A skilled technician could replace that chip, but smartphone and laptop manufacturers are actively trying to obstruct this. It is "reduce, reuse, recycle" for a reason: recycling should be the the last resort - not the first.

giantrobot 4y ago
> Electronics can often be repaired, but we throw them away instead. A skilled technician replacing a 2¢ part on a $10 board costs more than a new $10 board. Just disassembling that board to recycle parts off of it will cost more than the board originally cost to manufacture. You also run into the same argument against landfill airbag controllers. A factory that produces a million boards can have very good reliability metrics. A skilled technician not only has more variable output but less accurate quality metrics unless they put a lot of extra effort into process controls. A recycled board will cost more and be statistically less reliable from a brand new board. It would be more efficient to just mechanically separate them to extract raw materials.