4 ms·

Right, but put together a 'recycling company'. What's the cheapest way when you don't have access to skilled labor? Probably to just melt it all down and skim o

• DanBC 15y ago
  But even with semi-skilled labour you can recycle copper reasonably easily. At least, it could be done a lot better than just burning the insulation off cables. There's so much stuff which could be reasonably easily recycled - the lead, aluminium, copper are all easy. Then stuff like gold is extractable. Then the rare earth minerals - is it easier to scrape all the surface mount components of a board and then extract the tantalum etc than it is to mine those things from raw ore? I understand the need to protect developing nations by not just dumping garbage on them in the guise of "second hand computing good enough to use". As I understand it, one of the problems is that in some places the safety equipment you give people has a high re-sale value, thus people sell their boots / gloves /masks to get cash. I'm not sure how that'd be fixed.