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I'm fairly certain "recycling" in this case means extracting the gold plating from the circuit boards and maybe the aluminium from the case. I think they're sta
by rvense 4y ago
I'm fairly certain "recycling" in this case means extracting the gold plating from the circuit boards and maybe the aluminium from the case. I think they're starting to do the batteries as well, but I'm not sure it's happening yet. Certainly all the epoxy and fibre glass and most of the minerals inside the components are unsalvagable. Most of what was a magical machine is going to be toxic garbage forever, and not on a human, but a geological timescale.
- bruce343434 4y agoWhy isn't it melted down into a giant "distillery" where you can drain certain levels for the materials? The slag would be hardened out then crushed, and maybe a centrifuge can take it from there to separate even further.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- marcosdumay 4y agoThe results aren't valuable enough to pay for this kind of processing.
- rvense 4y agoI was actually under the impression that this is more or less what they do, but that not everything can be recovered this way, in particular the various materials that get encased in epoxy for ease of handling, like most of electronic components. And when you look at the semiconductors, the chips and the display, the input materials to most of it aren't really that special, as I understand, but turning the sand into thinking machines takes clean rooms, factories, transportation and processing that add up to huge amounts of energy - in some cases as much as will be used to power the device in its lifetime, I've heard. And no recycling technique is ever going to bring the embodied energy back.