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> There are machines to cut the cables and shred printed circuit boards to smallest pieces and recycle all the valuable materials. Even sort out plastic enclosu

> There are machines to cut the cables and shred printed circuit boards to smallest pieces and recycle all the valuable materials. Even sort out plastic enclosure parts or glass by corresponding densities. I'd love to learn more about this. What's the state of the art? How do the economics work out? For now, I take my end-of-life electronics to the local BestBuy. They have pretty good recycling standards, which include attempts to reuse & refurbish devices: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/recycling/recycle-guidelines/pcmcat174700050010.c?id=pcmcat174700050010 https://www.bestbuy.com/site/recycling/recycle-guidelines/pc...

lnsru 2y ago
The thing is that the economics are poor. Why? Because additional processing step of these materials in recycling plant produces worse quality materials that need purifying again if used for production. Except copper of course. And there should be two viewpoints: one is the cheapest way of getting the raw materials for production of other things. And the second is the clean way of getting rid of tons of electronics waste. Think about shelves of 17” first generation LCDs. Still not broken, but just outdated. The second one imho justifies the higher costs of materials. But if someone will pay let’s say 5% more for a television that was produced from recycled material… I don’t know. I see everywhere around greenwashing and I would not trust this anymore.
- pbronez 2y ago
  It would ideal to price in end of life costs. Oh, it takes $100 to return that $50 item to usable materials? It is now a $150 item. Of course, you should also price in the environmental costs of manufacturing, shipping, and using the thing. So many challenges with this. How do you quantify the environmental cost for an object over its entire life cycle? How do you efficiently route the new funds to actually mitigate the damage? How do you handle the inevitable black markets? How do you avoid regressive effects? I don’t have answers for all these. I just think “The Biome” is the scarce resource we should be using money to allocate.

lnsru 2y ago

The thing is that the economics are poor. Why? Because additional processing step of these materials in recycling plant produces worse quality materials that need purifying again if used for production. Except copper of course. And there should be two viewpoints: one is the cheapest way of getting the raw materials for production of other things. And the second is the clean way of getting rid of tons of electronics waste. Think about shelves of 17” first generation LCDs. Still not broken, but just outdated. The second one imho justifies the higher costs of materials. But if someone will pay let’s say 5% more for a television that was produced from recycled material… I don’t know. I see everywhere around greenwashing and I would not trust this anymore.

pbronez 2y ago
It would ideal to price in end of life costs. Oh, it takes $100 to return that $50 item to usable materials? It is now a $150 item. Of course, you should also price in the environmental costs of manufacturing, shipping, and using the thing. So many challenges with this. How do you quantify the environmental cost for an object over its entire life cycle? How do you efficiently route the new funds to actually mitigate the damage? How do you handle the inevitable black markets? How do you avoid regressive effects? I don’t have answers for all these. I just think “The Biome” is the scarce resource we should be using money to allocate.