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.
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.
if you're going into business for recycling or refurbishing, you're probably not taking a shotgun approach and doing everything. Specialisation is key. Is your focus on gathering electronics, refurbishing, refining metals, being a middle man, etc.
Yes, there are lots of people who legally refine precious metals from electronics and make a living. There are also lots of people who are middlemen and sell it to others.
High value metals like gold are refined by LOTS of companies.
"Mining " gold from dumps could be very productive because the concentration is MUCH higher in electronics than in the most productive gold mine. Profitable Gold mines typically mine and process an average of more than 2000-4000 pound of ore to obtain one ounce of gold!
It is much more environmentally conscious (In some instances more profitable) to recycle electronics than to mine for precious metals.
Nope, the items with negative value cause significant problems. CRT displays are the largest design problem that recyclers are working their way through.
^ 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.
It is certainly possible to meet all of one's nutritional requirements on 1 USD per day of food, especially if you have a chicken to provide eggs.
If working 48 hour weeks, 1 USD per hour is $208 per month, which is a modestly good wage in some places. Not really the minimum, although probably so for a very dirty and unpleasant job in a recycling factory.
I can offer a little insight. One of the companies I work for buys salvage/returned merchandise (mostly electronics, computers and related devices, office furniture, appliances, etc). We go through the items sorting out what is worth reselling as is, what requires further inspection and repair, and obvious junk beyond repair. The items requiring inspection and/or repair go to me, and about half of what I look at is considered "open box" or "damaged box", gets a cursory inspection, is run though the paces and checked for functionality, and sent on to the people who list it on various online marketplaces. About a fourth of the remaining items sent to me are repairable, which I do and send on to the sellers listed as "seller refurbished". The remaining portion is sent to the junk pile if I can't repair it or if it's missing too many parts to be worth selling. I will sometimes hold back a valuable part (power supply, special cable, etc) from an unsellable part to use for a similar item in the future.
From the junk pile, we sell by weight to recyclers who either break the items down into recyclable parts themselves, or sell them on to firms that handle what they can't, including extracting rare metals from circuit boards. To my knowledge, such firms are based here in the US, but I don't know enough about that side of the chain to name any.
You're right, most of the stuff is sent to China or elsewhere for actual extraction, due mainly to the environmental factors associated with processing [electronics are made of nasty stuff]. Labor's a factor as well, though the North American companies who do this have got their processes nailed down efficiencywise
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.
It's quite tempting considering the tons of stuff thrown out.
I think with a small team of quite knowledgeable people you can have different revenue streams
- stupid repairs (failing buttons, so common)
- parts (where the team would be here to create test tooling)
- materials (here you'd need chemistry knowledge)
I'd love that but I admit it's not easy and can be risky (never injured myself more than since I started scavenging parts)
I've thought about this as a commercial operation in the UK; but TBH I can't see that you could make enough money from it. However, it does seem to serve a very useful function in society, and would be something I'd want to fund through government - but it goes against commercial interests (people with repairs don't buy as much stuff).
We're getting some charities working to help people make repairs, some maker-spaces and such that facilitate people doing it themselves, etc..
It's not impossible to make a living refurbishing electronics... the big problem isn't fixing the electronics. It's gathering them, selling them, and supporting sold electronics.
Some people do a great job. Check out recraigslist.com and applianceschool.com (same person runs both) for examples of how to refurb/ flip large appliances at scale.
The blind center of lad Vegas is another successful organisation that refurbished at scale.
Computer repair and cell phone repair stores are another example of successful refurbishing at scale...
One of the biggest problems is that individuals and businesses hoard old electronics... Loss aversion (the fear of losing something perceived as valuable) is a big reason that more electronics aren't refurbished or recycled. Fear of data theft is another, smaller reason that more electronics aren't recycled.
In the end, there are a lot of pros and a lot of cons to this business... because it is difficult to be consistently successful, there is a lot of opportunity. There are a lot of ways to make money in the recycling industry. Finding and developing a niche that other people can't or don't want to do-- that has a high upside -- can be a great way to make a good living.
If you want to jump on, there is little risk --- mostly just a trip to the metals yard.
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.
>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.
« 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.
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).
I don't know about appliances, but the last few times I tried to repair a failed electronic device I found them to be un-repairable by design.
It is so frustrating to know that all something likely needs is a small surface component, but you can't repair it. Usually this is due to components being epoxied or dipped for seemingly no reason. At least thanks to ebay, you can sometimes find a duplicate broken device that can be harvested for whole PCBs.
People don’t throw out technology until it’s obsolete for THEM. There are tiers of consumers across the world for whom obsolete is defined at different stages of functionality/performance/affordability/etc.
Does "Obsolete" only apply to consumer grade applications though? Can there be a market for refurbishing old phones, laptops etc for IoT controllers that don't need massive processing power?
hmmm, I worked at google when they were doing a drive upgrade. They couldn't erase 100,000 hard drives (it would take years of time in the eraser machines) so they had to destroy them, which I assume meant melting them and eventually extracting the gold.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
I suspect that this is an industry that will become more profitable though, not less, over time. Some materials will become harder to naturally mine over time, as we use it faster than it's created, and hence, the value of those materials will rise.
I would guess that some day, mining materials in a garbage dump would be more profitable than mining them from the ground.
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.
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.
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.
For CPUs at idle, able to turn off power to accessories, power consumption has gone down dramatically over the last decade. True, the curve has been flattening over the last 5 years, but it's still noticeable.
> From that argument, we should be coding everything in hand tuned assembly, because hand tuned assembly gives a 10% to 200% speedup over C.
Yes, all things equal, it's better to write faster CPU-bound code. In a world in which writing optimal machine code all the time was possible without sacrificing anything else important, then we would always want to do it. This is hardly a controversial conclusion.
The reason we don't write faster CPU-bound code is that, in the world we live in, all things are never equal. Correctness, security, maintainability, development velocity, portability, engineering culture/trends, and so on are usually more important than raw CPU performance.
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.
> 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).
> 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.
That's not how thing work. GPUs/TPUs aren't magic, they don't speed everything up: they are really good is some scenario, but they are really slow in many others: the cost of loading memory to the GPU and back from it has a huge cost and it's only worth it if the GPU has enough work to do with the workload.
In theory, you could write a web server that runs on the GPU (at least a majority of it, it will still need some CPU work obviously), but it would be incredibly slow, probably slower than if it was a regular web server running on a machine from the 90s.
FPGA are totally different beasts, you can theoretically speed up anything with them, but
1. that requires a LOT of work, and
2. they aren't new: anything you can do with FPGA today, you could do it in 1995 already.
The most effective of those strategies (specialized hardware, SIMD/wide-register instructions, shallow suspend, etc.) are only possible with hardware support. So yes, even though transistor and ALU power efficiency isn't going down that fast, the power usage of a given complete processor or SoC is going down.
I need to post a major correction to my comment above.
All my power numbers here were off by three orders of magnitude. The MSP430 uses almost a nanojoule per instruction, not almost a picojoule.¹ The Pentium used 10 nanojoules per instruction, not 10 picojoules.² The STM32L011x3/4 uses 0.23 nJ per instruction, not 0.23 pJ.³ The LPC1110 uses 0.3 nJ per instruction, not 0.3 pJ.⁴ Research CPUs using exotic logic families have reached 0.01 nJ per instruction in 2008 and 0.0026 nJ per instruction in 2006, not below 0.05 pJ.⁵
Also, I should have mentioned the GreenArrays chips, which are actually fast; they're not mainstream not because they're slow but because you can't program them in C. Each core has 64 words of RAM and no PROM, so the only practical way to program them is in Forth. But they use 8 pJ per instruction, i.e. 0.008 nJ.
³ According to the ST datasheet for the STM32L011x3 and STM32L011x4 (DocID027973 Rev 5), these chips typically use 1.95 mA at 16MHz on range 2 (Vcore = 1.5 V, VOS[1:0] = 10) on the HSI16 clock source with Dhrystone-equivalent data processing code executed from RAM, Flash switched OFF, in Run mode (Table 24 on p.55 in §6.3.4, "Supply Current Characteristics"), and they claim 0.95 Dhrystone MIPS per MHz on the front page. This is with Vdd = 3.0 V (according to p. 52) but the extra 1.5 V is just burned in a linear voltage regulator, so the current consumption should be almost exactly the same anywhere in the operational range from 1.65 V to 3.6 V. If we assume 1.8 V, which is probably close to the lowest safe voltage, we get 1.8V · 1.95 mA = 3.51 mW. Dividing this by 0.95 · 16 MHz, we get 231 pJ per instruction; presumably in real life the number would vary anywhere from 200 to 1000. Both higher and lower clock speeds use more energy per instruction, as does running from Flash.
⁴ The LPC1110 datasheet http://www.nxp.com/documents/data_sheet/LPC111X.pdf claims it can run at 48 MHz at 1.8 V and just under 8 mA, which works out to 300 pJ per instruction. It's probably using an earlier version of the same IP core in the ST chip.
Semiconductors are fairly unique in this regard- power consumption has been going down so quickly for so long, it can often be both uneconomical and environmentally unfriendly to continue to operate older hardware.
Embodied environmental impact is a difficult calculation, and nobody ever agrees on a number for any complex product like semiconductors, cars, solar panels. But, if we one day price in all the externalities, we can count on the markets to run the numbers for us.
If anything, electricity production probably has more subsidies & externalities than semiconductor manufacture.
There is a Vancouver-based non-profit called FreeGeek (https://www.freegeekvancouver.org/) that takes in e-waste, salvages usable parts and sells them back to fund their tech-education efforts. I'm surprised that this does not exist in Silicon Valley, it most certainly should.
Sadly the quality and build methodologies on most modern hardware that becomes e-waste isn't really suited to long-term re-use.
Solder joints get smaller and closer every year, leaving whiskers more and more likely to eventually short out two adjacent pins. Not to mention the cheap failure prone board level components found everywhere. (Yay for esploding capacitors).
And that's before you even get to all the junk embedded devices that have little in the way of standardization or documentation, etc. That hardware will likely never run software the OEM didn't ship.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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".
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.
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.
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
