A new UN report finds that humanity is generating 137 billion pounds of TVs, smartphones, and other e-waste a year—and recycling less than a quarter of it.
There are trace amounts of precious metals mixed in with a lot of other crap. It’s possible to recover them, but nobody is going to do that if recovery costs more than the metals are worth.
'Tis the nature of Economics. -If recycling for money were easy and profitable then it’s highly likely that someone would already be doing it really well and competition would be jumping in to reap some of the rewards. -That said, you will always need a ‘Pioneer’ to pave the way.
People are doing this, but it requires some gnarly acids and a lot of material. Think extracting gold from sticks of RAM with aqua regia. Not sure of the exact process but scrappers do this in some capacity. I’d imagine the waste from these processes is particularly nasty.
While there’s precious metals in them, it’s not a whole lot. An average laptop contains 0.3 grams of gold for example. But it takes a lot of effort to extract that. There’ll be some other precious metals in it, but in similarly small quantities and just as difficult to extract. And after that, you’d be stuck with the rest of it that YOU now need to get rid of.
Basically, unless you can grossly underpay someone in a poor country with little regulations, it’s very hard to make that profitable. It’s simply not worth the effort when new materials are still cheap and easy to get.
Less and less, the last good stuff was made well before the millennium. It costs to put it in there, so manufacturing processes have become more plastic, less metal. Same goes for cars and white goods.
E waste is full of precious metals. You’d think someone would figure out how to recover them.
There are trace amounts of precious metals mixed in with a lot of other crap. It’s possible to recover them, but nobody is going to do that if recovery costs more than the metals are worth.
'Tis the nature of Economics. -If recycling for money were easy and profitable then it’s highly likely that someone would already be doing it really well and competition would be jumping in to reap some of the rewards. -That said, you will always need a ‘Pioneer’ to pave the way.
People are doing this, but it requires some gnarly acids and a lot of material. Think extracting gold from sticks of RAM with aqua regia. Not sure of the exact process but scrappers do this in some capacity. I’d imagine the waste from these processes is particularly nasty.
While there’s precious metals in them, it’s not a whole lot. An average laptop contains 0.3 grams of gold for example. But it takes a lot of effort to extract that. There’ll be some other precious metals in it, but in similarly small quantities and just as difficult to extract. And after that, you’d be stuck with the rest of it that YOU now need to get rid of.
Basically, unless you can grossly underpay someone in a poor country with little regulations, it’s very hard to make that profitable. It’s simply not worth the effort when new materials are still cheap and easy to get.
Less and less, the last good stuff was made well before the millennium. It costs to put it in there, so manufacturing processes have become more plastic, less metal. Same goes for cars and white goods.