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Similarly I used to work overnight in a strip mall next door to a PC/e-waste "recycling" place. Out back in the alley was just a massive pile of obsolete 90s/e

Similarly I used to work overnight in a strip mall next door to a PC/e-waste "recycling" place. Out back in the alley was just a massive pile of obsolete 90s/early 2000s PCs that hadn't been broken down or stripped of e-waste in any way. I'd go rummaging through it sometimes looking for a usable Pentium 3 processor and some ram. Maybe a hard disk that wasn't roached. Built a bunch of fun little Linux computers with those. Anyway, the owner went to jail for something or other unrelated. I'm sure all that stuff went to the landfill.

lotsofpulp 4y ago
> I'm sure all that stuff went to the landfill. I assume almost everything I “recycle” goes to landfill too. It just happened to go to a landfill in China before they stopped accepting it.
- nine_k 4y ago
  Paper, glass, and metals, in larger chunks, likely get recycled, because it's economically sensible. Anything more complicated, especially tightly bound together, is likely cheaper to dump on a landfill. Which I think is sort of fine for non-toxic, non-volatile stuff.
- libraryatnight 4y ago
  Pretty much, I recall: https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/4/20992240/e-waste-recycling-electronic-basel-convention-crime-total-reclaim-fraud https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/4/20992240/e-waste-recyclin... whenever recycling e-waste comes up.
rapnie 4y ago
Shouldn't e-waste be highly profitable to recycle with that high concentration of metals? Urban mining at our doorstep and not halfway across the globe and a mile underground. Is the separation of all the materials inherently unprofitable or aren't the upfront investments to get things going just never made?
- bragr 4y ago
  >Shouldn't e-waste be highly profitable to recycle with that high concentration of metals? Based on some videos of people attempting DIY metal extraction from e-waste, no not really. Sure there's valuable metal there, but only thin films of it, and that's before you get to the extraction problem. Sure you can dissolve the metals off the boards with acid, but then you've got a solution of mixed dissolved metals you've got to process back into different pure metals, and deal with all the chemical waste. A gram of copper is ~$0.01 according to a quick search so it's pretty difficult to get any profit. edit: don't know what the first metal prices site found I was smoking, but accurate prices make the case even more.
  - metadat 4y ago
    Small correction: Copper is currently around $9 USD/Kg.
    - CameronNemo 4y ago
      Which is just about $0.01/gram, as the commenter stated.
      - metadat 4y ago
        Parent originally stated $4/gram. Perhaps the post was amended without notation. Edit: @bragr: No worries, I'm just bad at reading sometimes or possibly even all the time. My mistake.
        bragr 4y ago
        I literally added a whole "edited: ..." line to the end when I updated it.

lotsofpulp 4y ago

> I'm sure all that stuff went to the landfill. I assume almost everything I “recycle” goes to landfill too. It just happened to go to a landfill in China before they stopped accepting it.

nine_k 4y ago
Paper, glass, and metals, in larger chunks, likely get recycled, because it's economically sensible. Anything more complicated, especially tightly bound together, is likely cheaper to dump on a landfill. Which I think is sort of fine for non-toxic, non-volatile stuff.
libraryatnight 4y ago
Pretty much, I recall: https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/4/20992240/e-waste-recycling-electronic-basel-convention-crime-total-reclaim-fraud https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/4/20992240/e-waste-recyclin... whenever recycling e-waste comes up.

rapnie 4y ago

Shouldn't e-waste be highly profitable to recycle with that high concentration of metals? Urban mining at our doorstep and not halfway across the globe and a mile underground. Is the separation of all the materials inherently unprofitable or aren't the upfront investments to get things going just never made?

bragr 4y ago
>Shouldn't e-waste be highly profitable to recycle with that high concentration of metals? Based on some videos of people attempting DIY metal extraction from e-waste, no not really. Sure there's valuable metal there, but only thin films of it, and that's before you get to the extraction problem. Sure you can dissolve the metals off the boards with acid, but then you've got a solution of mixed dissolved metals you've got to process back into different pure metals, and deal with all the chemical waste. A gram of copper is ~$0.01 according to a quick search so it's pretty difficult to get any profit. edit: don't know what the first metal prices site found I was smoking, but accurate prices make the case even more.
- metadat 4y ago
  Small correction: Copper is currently around $9 USD/Kg.
  - CameronNemo 4y ago
    Which is just about $0.01/gram, as the commenter stated.
    - metadat 4y ago
      Parent originally stated $4/gram. Perhaps the post was amended without notation. Edit: @bragr: No worries, I'm just bad at reading sometimes or possibly even all the time. My mistake.
      - bragr 4y ago
        I literally added a whole "edited: ..." line to the end when I updated it.