
E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet - sonabinu
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44642176
======
netman21
I am in the e-waste industry. There are thousands of companies doing this
already. This article is written like the BBC just discovered this. While
there are many small processors there are also big ones like Arrow
Electronics. The hottest item is phones. There is a small shop down the road
from me that processes 300K phones a month. They are not capital intensive but
are very labor intensive. Most of the money is in reuse. They clean and test
the phones, grade them, and sell them on. The non-working ones can have their
parts salvaged. The true scrap is sent on to smelters to extract the valuable
stuff and dispose of the rest responsibly. Most follow the Responsible
Recycling (R2) standard. Some things like cathode ray tube glass has a
negative value, meaning you have to pay someone to dispose of it.

~~~
walrus01
Serious question, once the things that still work have been repaired, resold,
or dismantled for parts to repair other things. Is there ANY way that with
north American labor costs and insurance, OSHA standards, pollution
regulations, energy costs etc, that it's economical to start melting down
printed circuit boards for metal recovery?

Because either I am guessing this article is delusional, or they're completely
ignoring the part where the dirty messy work gets done by people in a poor
country for $1/hour wages.

~~~
kwiens
Nope, the items with negative value cause significant problems. CRT displays
are the largest design problem that recyclers are working their way through.

Just this week, ECS Refining, Apple's main recycler in California, shut down.
All of their unprocessed material is now the responsibility of their landlord.
[https://resource-recycling.com/e-scrap/2018/07/03/ecs-
refini...](https://resource-recycling.com/e-scrap/2018/07/03/ecs-refining-set-
to-close-down/)

~~~
MisterOctober
^ fact. I work for a refurbishing company, and while some of the scrap
generated gets a decent payout from the recycling folks [the best common
category being old PII and PIII boards / older finger boards AKA controller
cards], the negative value stuff like CRTs, fluorescent lamps, and Ni-Cad
batteries is awful to deal with. The big CRT operation in my state shut down a
while ago, so now they have to be sent out of state i.e., cost more now to
offload.

------
guywithaphone
I've tried both metals, refurbish and parts recycling...

Refurbishing or selling for parts is MUCH more valuable than metals recycling.
It's also MUCH MUCH more work.

Three first problem is getting valuable E-waste at a good price. (Free or
cheap in large quantities) then comes separating out older parts (higher gold
content), then identifying and testing newer parts for refurbishing or parts
sales. Then advertising refurb or parts, then the sale, then support for the
items you sold.

While there are a LOT of parts in closets, basements or other storage, it is
difficult to obtain products that have a high resale value at the right price.

Then factor in that newer computers and phones are getting much faster and/or
using less power.

Also, recycling does have risks-- including dust, toxic fires, and safe
disposal.

It's not impossible to make money recycling/refurbishing, but it is difficult
and usually requires scale.

~~~
nerdponx
_Then factor in that newer computers and phones are getting much faster and
/or using less power._

This part is hard for me, as a big proponent of "reduce, reuse, recycle."
Reduce isn't that hard until your technology becomes obsolete. Reuse is
typically impossible because people don't throw out technology until it's
obsolete. So recycling is the only option left.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>people don't throw out technology until it's obsolete

People throw out computers (including screens and everything) because the
mouse stopped working, or the power supply needs replacing or the computer got
a virus. A washing machine needs a new door-seal, a cooker needs a new light,
people actually throw out that sort of stuff. Ebay has helped to make a market
for junk, but oftentimes it seems people over-estimate the financial value of
their used stuff and that hinders reuse in favour of replacement.

~~~
tajen
« A door seal’s gonna cost as much as a new machine sir. » Every repairman.

It’s a difficult economic issue. Suitably skilled repairmen only exist medium
economies, where we produce enough income to teach youngsters soldering, but
when the economy is not developed as much as to have marketers take the power
over the makers (think Juicero). In the Western economy today, repairmen are
more salesmen on the field than actual people capable of repairing anything.
I’ve never seen one actually repairing an appliance.

I have my doubt whether it’s really the machines getting built in such a way
that repairs are impossible, oftentimes it does seem like a little more search
could have found the defective wire, but let’s be honest, if they want to
survive in a big city, soldering won’t pay enough. And that’s where the
economy is surprising. Somehow those repairman jobs have higher hourly rates
than replacing the machine, meaning shipping a new 50-kg appliance across the
world is less costly than shipping a repairman across New York.

~~~
Retra
That's really just economy of scale at work, right? Shipping one repair man to
a single location is less efficient than shipping ten thousand units from a
factory to a distribution center. Servicing all of your customers (new and
old) with the same mechanism is more efficient than having different
mechanisms for new (sales & delivery) and old (repair).

------
rrggrr
This ship sailed. Its generally accepted that e-scrap processor's margins are
15% or less. Its not just the cost to access/buy the materials that keeps
margins low. The CAPEX costs are enormous, there are large operating costs,
and regulatory compliance is also very expensive. Further complicating matters
is government flip-flopping on mandated electronic scrap collection
regulations that make it tough for business to predict future returns on
investment. Add to that the volatility of the commodities markets and its no
easy task to make a profit these days in electronic scrap. Nobody is getting
rich of e-scrap that doesn't already have a foot or other appendage in the
game.

~~~
gascan
Isn't 15% a pretty good margin? Restaurants & retail make low single digit
margins.

~~~
rrggrr
On a risk adjusted basis, no. You're buying the raw material assuming aluminum
heat sinks will be .67/lb, only to discover that by the time you've liberated
the Al from the stream the price has dropped to .40/lb. That just happened.
Or, you've invested $30m - $100m in an Ontario e-scrap plant assuming the
CADGOV won't reverse its e-scrap policy. Then it does essentially that and the
market you thought you had has changed dramatically. That happened.

~~~
21
> assuming aluminum heat sinks will be .67/lb, only to discover that by the
> time you've liberated the Al from the stream the price has dropped to .40/lb

Maybe you can use a financial hedging contract to lock in the price of alu?

~~~
recycledmatt
Typically the volumes are relatively small, which makes it’s expensive to
hedge.

It’s a penny game. If you are making a 35% spread on your buy/sell the one
time inventory depreciation will definitely hurt, but your spread and net
pennies per pound has also gone down substantially as well.

------
fuball63
I would like to see more e-waste initiatives based in reuse instead of
recycling. To me it seems like any advances on the recycling front are
outpaced by throwaway tech culture and general overconsumption.

Seeing as processor speeds have pretty much plateaued [1], I wonder if it is
useful to start thinking less in terms of precious metals and instead in
potential processing power of e-waste. I remember a discussion on here about
cheap web host providers using consumer grade boxes as servers. With today's
cluster technologies, there's certainly creative applications for processing
power that would end up in a landfill.

[1] [https://www.maketecheasier.com/why-cpu-clock-speed-isnt-
incr...](https://www.maketecheasier.com/why-cpu-clock-speed-isnt-increasing/)

~~~
bahmboo
Power consumption is going down with each gen and is big cost driver. Also
heat dissipation in data centers is costly. Gotta consider TCO in these cases.

~~~
kragen
This is almost completely wrong, because Dennard scaling ended around 2002.

Power consumption in mainstream CPUs has been a few picojoules per instruction
since the Pentium. Even the MSP430 is almost a pJ/insn. Modern ultra-low-power
CPUs like the STM32L reach down below 0.3 pJ/insn, as did the LPC1110 a decade
ago. Its more mainstream STM32F siblings are still stuck at 1.5 pJ/insn.
Research CPUs using exotic logic families have been below 0.05 pJ/insn since
2000, but are too slow for mass adoption.

Power reduction this millennium is almost entirely about changing architecture
to GPUs and other more specialized hardware, using wider registers (with SIMD
instructions at times) and being smarter about turning things off and ramping
their clocks.

Concurrently we've seen a huge move from languages like C and Java to
languages like JS (10x the computational load of C even with JIT) and Python
(200x, or 5x if your program is dominated by Numpy.)

So power usage is not a big reason for not using CPUs from 5 years ago.

~~~
bb88
From that argument, we should be coding everything in hand tuned assembly,
because hand tuned assembly gives a 10% to 200% speedup over C.

The number one slowdown I've seen in rendering web pages, were not bad
algorithms or bad programming languages, but bad database queries.

And if that's the case, there is a lot more optimization in the DB to be
gained than rewriting your back-end to C, say.

~~~
kragen
This was true in 1995, assuming you can spend unlimited time writing your
code. You can almost certainly get an order of magnitude better performance
with a custom backend written in a low-level language instead of a SQL
database. And, I don't know if you've ever used a SQL database written in
Python instead of C, but I have, and it's definitely a lot slower.

But it's not true today, because today hand-tuned assembly is slow compared to
what you can do on the GPU or an FPGA or a TPU.

And, of course, it's not true that you _should_ do this if you can't spend
unlimited time writing your code. It's entirely reasonable to use slower
languages like Python and JS if you can hack faster as a result. Since many of
us are taking that entirely reasonable option, the number of CPU cycles needed
to run basic applications is going up, which increases power consumption.

~~~
bb88
> And, I don't know if you've ever used a SQL database written in Python
> instead of C, but I have, and it's definitely a lot slower.

I don't doubt that but on today's web stacks you use either MySQL or Postgres
typically and both those are written in C.

Yes, you can create your own DB written in a low level language, but you'll be
hitting the same issues that the DB solves for you (indexing upon insertions,
query optimizations, transactional operations, etc).

------
aurizon
Well, back in the old days, with gold bonded dies in ceramic housings almost
all ICs had good value. This was in 1975 or so. Back in those days they also
plated 30-50 micro inches on fingers. Then gold hit the roof, and all parts
had gold "adders" = increased prices along with gold. They would like to use 1
micro inch plating on fingers, but copper and gold are totally miscible(same
series in the periodic table) and with 1 micro inch the copper would migrate
to the plated surface by diffusion and corrode with the CO2 in the air = green
shit. Then they found that 5 micro inches of nickel plating would block
diffusion and they could use 1 micro inch gold over nickel, so by 1985 or so,
fingers began to decline. They are still valuable, but nor worth $100 a pound
like the old military trimmed fingers were. So find scrap buried in the 1970s,
and you might have a shot - but only if you get a lot of boards, refrigerators
had very little gold.

------
ape4
When its time to upgrade the ewaste extracting robot, its child will mine
their parents.

~~~
ryanmercer
You're dark, I love it.

------
Bucephalus355
Literally just met someone for the first time yesterday who is moving to Texas
to do this.

Apparently, the refresh rate for cloud data centers is now getting down to 2
years or less. Easier to expand by replacing instead of leasing new space.
This, combined with how environmentally conscious the big cloud companies are,
has led to a big demand in IT Asset Disposal services. Also obviously there
are security aspects in play here.

In PW Singer’s novel about war with China, pretty sure this was a big plot
point when imports of microchips stopped and regular citizens had to donate
their iPads and what not to be stripped of valuable material.

~~~
lostlogin
> moving to Texas to do this.

Why Texas? Are there lots of data centres there? If so, is that an energy cost
thing, because it seems a place with greater cooling requirements?

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Texas has been big with datacenters for a long time. Apparently some tax
exemptions may be involved, as well as good access to a lot of power.

[https://www.dallasnews.com/news/news/2015/07/10/data-
centers...](https://www.dallasnews.com/news/news/2015/07/10/data-centers-an-
absolute-gold-mine-for-north-texas-cities)

------
esturk
Interesting they mentioned Apple's Daisy. I feel that Apple gets an unfair
amount of criticism for their lack of ewaste initiatives but none or very
little is attributed to other smartphone OEMs like Samsung.

~~~
cptskippy
Most of the attention stems from organizations like Greenpeace which tend to
attack high profile targets in ways that are as much self serving as they are
beneficial if not more so.

* Regarding Daisy, I'd be curious to hear how it handles damaged iPhones. Can it and to what degree? What percentage of iPhones can be recycled by it? I fear that any iPhone that's compromised won't be recycled out of concern for breaking the recycling machine.

------
peterburkimsher
When I was 8, my dad gave me a broken Mac Plus. He said that if I could fix
it, it would be mine! So I did. Later, when I was 15, I bought, fixed, and re-
sold a class set of 20 iBooks.

[http://peterburk.github.io/blog/#iBookRepair](http://peterburk.github.io/blog/#iBookRepair)

Then I went off to university and studied Electronic Systems Engineering. But
for the last 7 years, I've had work experience in software. I still regularly
fix computers for friends.

If there are tech recycling companies in NZ/Australia/Canada that are hiring,
I'd be so excited to do this full-time. If I got another job in Vancouver, I'd
volunteer with FreeGeek, just because I enjoy it so much. I wish I could get
paid to do my hobby though.

~~~
abhishekjha
How do you learn to do this? I am a CS grad(Bachelors) and I got my first
computer and started programming when I turned 19. Before then I used to just
browse the web.

What should I focus on to get more hands-on the hardware part?

~~~
peterburkimsher
I just taught myself, using what was then PBFixit, and is now iFixit. When
it's already broken, you can be more confident about trying to take it apart -
it can't get worse!

------
Scaevolus
Recycling individual components is profitable with sufficiently low wages.
Here's Bunnie Huang talking about that:
[https://youtu.be/y5QkM2Work0?t=1464](https://youtu.be/y5QkM2Work0?t=1464)

You can make a reasonably good living in Shenzhen by reselling expensive chips
from discarded hardware.

------
coldtea
If it's a good business it can't be "good for the planet".

Not just because it's the absence of business that is good for the planet
(absolutely speaking), but also because it being a business just means to
encourage more e-waste (for it to be mined). Plus all the externalities.

It's just another case of "we screw the planet badly, but we put some plastics
in special recycling bins, so that's ok".

------
vultour
As other people already said, extracting metals from old electronics has been
a thing for a long time. I don't know about gold/cooper/etc, but I met a guy
that was extracting galium arsenide from circuit boards, last I heard he was
opening a large plant in China. AFAIK it is (was?) actually pretty difficult
to pull that off, so he's one of the few people who do that.

------
chris_va
Obligatory How It's Made on gold recycling from e-waste:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Sp6Qhe1i8Y&t=3s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Sp6Qhe1i8Y&t=3s)

------
alkonaut
I have left computers for dissassembly and recycling since they had a “turbo”
button on them.

I don’t know where else to dispose them, it’s not like I could leave one in my
trash bin. Metal bin?

~~~
Symbiote
In Sweden, "special rubbish trucks go around cities and pick up electronics
and hazardous waste such as chemicals." (1). You can look up how that works
exactly. It's Sweden's way to do the EU WEEE directive.

In Copenhagen (this probably varies across Denmark) I have a small electronics
bin in the apartment building basement, with all the other bins. Officially, I
think its to be used for anything that fits, with larger things taken
somewhere else.

When I dispose of my desktop PC, I will take 5 minutes to unscrew the
motherboard, drives, PSU etc and put them in the electronics bin. The case
will go in the metal bin.

When I dispose of old elections at work, the whole lot goes in the large waste
electronics container.

(1) [https://sweden.se/nature/the-swedish-recycling-
revolution/](https://sweden.se/nature/the-swedish-recycling-revolution/)

------
JoblessWonder
I work across the street from one in California and they do a ton of business.
Lots of trucks dropping stuff off daily, which they weigh and charge.

------
dlhavema
doesn't this process involve lots of nasty chemicals to extract the precious
metals from circuit boards and the like? i saw an article on Hackady[0] about
this a while back

[0] - [https://hackaday.com/2013/11/18/salvaging-gold-from-old-
elec...](https://hackaday.com/2013/11/18/salvaging-gold-from-old-electronics/)

------
CodeCube
_Someone_ is gonna be rich

