I thought some of you might enjoy this.
[mod edit: fixed the embedded video link]
In a giant factory in California, thousands of screens, PCs and other old or unwanted gadgets are picked apart for materials. But what about the billions of other defunct (or not) devices?
In the lobby of Fresno airport is a forest of plastic trees. A bit on the nose, I think: this is central California, home of the grand Sequoia national park. But you can’t put a 3,000-year-old redwood in a planter (not to mention the ceiling clearance issue), so the tourist board has deemed it fit to build these towering, convincing copies. I pull out my phone and take a picture, amused and somewhat appalled. What will live longer, I wonder: the real trees or the fakes?
I haven’t come to Fresno to see the trees; I’ve come about the device on which I took the picture. In a warehouse in the south of the city, green trucks are unloading pallets of old electronics through the doors of Electronics Recyclers International (ERI), the largest electronics recycling company in the US.
Waste electrical and electronic equipment (better known by its unfortunate acronym, Weee) is the fastest-growing waste stream in the world. Electronic waste amounted to 53.6m tonnes in 2019, a figure growing at about 2% a year. Consider: in 2021, tech companies sold an estimated 1.43bn smartphones, 341m computers, 210m TVs and 548m pairs of headphones. And that’s ignoring the millions of consoles, sex toys, electric scooters and other battery-powered devices we buy every year. Most are not disposed of but live on in perpetuity, tucked away, forgotten, like the old iPhones and headphones in my kitchen drawer, kept “just in case”. As the head of MusicMagpie, a UK secondhand retail and refurbishing service, tells me: “Our biggest competitor is apathy.”
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Recyclersteve wrote:This looks like a hand made (not mass produced) machine.
Were there any specific comments about how much the machine cost [...]
MaxGravy wrote:Here's a fascinating article (with cool pictures) that I stumbled upon earlier today:
‘I spot brand new TVs, here to be shredded’: the truth about our electronic waste
Recyclersteve wrote:Oh yeah, I went to a local scrapyard about 3 months ago after calling around for quotes. I was only able to get 25 cents a pound for 12# of computer boards (so $3 total).
Thankfully I had a bunch of other stuff (wire, aluminum cans, etc.) to cash in at the same time.
messymessy wrote:Dr Cadmium is the one to ask about electronic scrap recovery.
Also, there was someone on here a long time ago named Silver Saddle. Lots of experience with E-waste. I believe he wrote some posts about it. How to sort it right and make it worth your time.
Scrap yards that buy E-waste are rare. I think there are only two scrap yards in Ohio that buy E-waste for what it is worth. There are also places that you can ship it to.
Recyclersteve wrote:With equipment that expensive, TINY amounts of gold in the boards you recycle, and very little real competition out there, that tells me this is a very specialized area suitable for very few businesses. I’d love to interview someone (or tour a business) who/that can actually do this with a sizable profit.
One angle they might try is this. Process gold as a loss leader to get people to bring their other stuff in. In exchange, pay a bit less for stuff like bare bright copper, aluminum cans, brass, etc.
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