alexandrehtrb•20h
Ask HN: Why are electronics still so unrecyclable?item?id=46975933

I was wondering why electronics and computer parts are so unrecyclable (is there a better word for that?).

From what I searched, only a small percentage of electronics are recycled and those that do, are through chemical processes. Electronics today use plastics and special metals, and extracting them isn't straightforward, because requires energy and big acid digestors.

Is there some kind of initiative on this area, on using other materials or designing chips and boards to be more recyclable or reusable?

130 comments
  • Apreche•19h

    This is why the saying has always been “reduce, reuse, recycle” in that order.

    Reducing is the best. Don’t buy or make surplus stuff, and that reduces waste overall.

    Reusing is second best. If we did make something, the best thing to do is get as much use out of it as possible to prevent it from ever becoming trash.

    Recycling is the last resort. Regardless of what is being recycled, it is an expensive and difficult process to try to salvage any value from the waste materials rather than just abandoning them.

    Because recycling electronics is such a difficult problem, if we want to reduce e-waste a better idea is to increase our efforts to reduce and reuse them as much as possible. Installing Linux on an old laptop to keep it useful for somebody is easy to do, and much more effective than trying to recycle it.

    • Pfhortune•14h

      This is why every device should be bootloader-unlockable (with legal enforcement). There's billions of old phones and IoT devices out there locked to outdated software. This has to change.

      If it can't be unlocked, it can't be sold. That should be the law.

    • KellyCriterion•15h

      > always been “reduce, reuse, recycle” in that order

      my dev machine for boring CRUD apps is from 2011 :-D

      the only thing I upgraded was RAM and a SSD - its a 4x 3Ghz board; it works quite well despite the fact that its 15 years old :)

      (honestly, the only thing why I do not switch is because of reinstallig the whole setup)

      • edoceo•13h

        Re-install? Just set the bootloader, and rsync the stuff over?

        • KellyCriterion•13h

          Not sure: Its a Windows machine? :-D

          • pabs3•17m

            With Linux you could probably just move the drives over and it would work.

          • Gud•2h

            Nuke it from orbit

    • smileysteve•15h

      To put this in perspective, there are huge issues recyling lead acid batteries exposed this year.

      I consider lead acid batteries relatively simple with all materials being large and not particularly binding.

      But it's somehow easy to outsource this to a smelter with inappropriate smelting, and no controls on worker safety.

      So anything smaller, more complex, or more interewined, with things like silica involved...

      • tonyedgecombe•14h

        Interestingly lead acid batteries are the most recycled consumer goods.

        Of course that’s not to say there are no problems with the process.

    • jltsiren•18h

      I find the "reduce, reuse, recycle" slogan misleading.

      Everything that is manufactured will eventually become waste that must be disposed of responsibly. The overall volume of manufacturing only goes up if we leave it to the market, and there is no serious political will to legislate it down. That leaves us with an ever-increasing volume of waste that must be dealt with, making waste management an increasingly important issue.

      • mcswell•12h

        In addition to the volume issue, there's the composition issue. When I was a kid, we recycled all our flint cores. Well, not quite that far back... Milk came in glass bottles, and the person who delivered the bottles of milk to our house picked up the empties to take back to the dairy. There were also steel cans for canned food and soft drinks (which eventually rusts away), and of course lots of other glass bottles. Now more and more of those kinds of things come in plastic, of which little gets recycled. And cans are often aluminum, which doesn't rust away.

        Furniture was wood and fabric and (maybe) springs, with a little bit of pressboard (which was itself recycled paper and textile, usually used on the back of desks etc.). Now furniture is particleboard (made from sawdust), with lots of glue and some kind of plastic veneer if it's in a place that shows. Wood is genuinely recyclable (or re-usable as antiques!); I don't think particleboard is recyclable, although I could be wrong.

        Automobiles were steel, fabric, glass and copper wire (with rubber insulation); plus of course rubber tires. Now they are those things plus a lot more plastic. Tires, both then and now, are essentially un-recyclable (although occasionally turned into artificial reefs).

        I could go on, but there are probably more authoritative (= better) studies of this. But I suspect in general that we have lots less recyclable "stuff" these days than we used to.

        • kalleboo•4h

          When I grew up in Sweden, soda was sold in standardized glass bottles. All brands used the same bottles and they just put paper labels on. You'd return the glass bottles for a deposit, they'd take them in, remove the label, wash then and refill them. You could tell how old the glass bottle you were drinking out of was by how scratched the label was.

          In the 90's, they were all replaced by PET bottles. We were told at the time that this was because the oil used in the plastic bottles was still less than the extra oil used to ship the heavy glass bottles back and forth.

      • benhill70•17h

        I think you are forgetting about time. If the rate of stuff needing to get recycle is lower, then there is more time to recycle. If there the rate is too high then the facilities are overwhelmed and resort to less optimal strategies.

        This is why reduce and reuse are important.

        • jltsiren•16h

          It's misleading because it focuses on actions that are clearly not working. People on the average are increasing their consumption, not reducing it. That means the actual problem — the waste at the end of the pipeline — is growing every year.

          Waste management is the actual problem that needs to be solved. "Reduce and reuse" can be a part of the solution, but people are not doing enough voluntarily to make it a major part.

          • estimator7292•16h

            Maybe it's because people spread FUD about the effectiveness of "reduce and reuse" instead of convincing others that "reduce and reuse" has value as a concept.

          • refulgentis•15h

            I'm genuinely curious about your position, it's interesting.

            But I can't figure it out what it'd look like in practice, might be hangover, might be I need more caffeine, whatever it is, it's on me. Don't read following as "you're saying X and thats silly!"

            (A) Are consumption rates in general unsustainable?

            (B) If (A) is no, are consumption rates of specific items unsustainable? For example, is the legislation you're thinking of like the deprecation of plastic bags for paper? Or something that covers a much wider amount of consumption?

            (C) If (A) is "yes" or (B) is "more global", at huge scales like an economy, legislating quotas or rationing or anything at all, in practice pushes activity onto black markets.

            If the concern is changing individual behavior, and individual behavior isn't changing on it's own sufficiently, what sort of legislation would change it?

      • refulgentis•17h

        So the idea of reducing consumption is misleading, the real solution is to reduce consumption (via the law forcing quotas on manufacturers and rationing on consumers)

        • 6510•16h

          Durability also cuts consumption. One can make the parts that break easy to replace and/or learn to do it at scale.

    • brudgers•11h

      Reusing is better than reducing because “reducing” is only meaningful in terms of reducing consumption. The only way to reduce what you already have is either disposal or recycling or reuse.

    • porise•19h

      I heard they changed it to 5Rs.

      Refuse, reduce, reuse, recyle, rot.

      • marcosdumay•18h

        Ignoring the ambiguity of the word "refuse", that often means "turn into trash", it's also completely redundant with "reduce". To the point that it doesn't add anything new.

        Anyway, "rot" is a good one.

        • reverius42•4h

          I think the idea is "buy nothing (in that category)" instead of "buy fewer things (in that category)" but I agree it's both ambiguous and ham-fisted.

        • mcswell•12h

          I hadn't heard the "rot" one, but I imagine it's referring to composting. We have a county-run composting site (https://www.princegeorgescountymd.gov/departments-offices/en...), and apparently when done right it produces a whole lot less methane than letting organics get buried and decompose in landfills.

        • Ekaros•13h

          There is overlap but I can see some distinction. Refuse might be simply not in first place buying some product group say a smartwatch. Where as reduce would be buying one but updating it less often. One could argue that refusing entire products is easier than reducing use.

      • renewiltord•17h

        It’s even better when you make it 10 Rs: refuse, rethink, reduce, reuse, repair, repurpose, rehome, recycle, rot.

        I think it’s twice as better.

      • skipants•18h

        I like that a lot -- going to start using it

      • AlexandrB•18h

        How confusing. There's no appreciable difference between "refuse" and "reduce". "Rot" is only applicable to organic waste, which is rarely considered part of "recycling" since the other Rs don't really apply.

        Seems like change for change's sake.

        • imglorp•18h

          Consumers have the option to "refuse" products from irresponsible or predatory vendors: ones which brick or obsolete devices.

          Vendors should at a minimum open source APIs for abandoned hardware and allow unlocking it. "Refuse" to buy from those that don't. Ask for legislation forcing it.

          I have a wonderful old ipad mini that's useless. I'd love to jailbreak it and put my OS on there but Apple wants a new sale instead.

        • randusername•18h

          I read it as refuse categorically and rot regardless of type in a big sweep from best to worst

          refuse to use any, reduce your usage, reuse yourself, recycle them into new products, or else they'll just rot

          I like it.

        • NooneAtAll3•18h

          Rot is about using bio-degradable options where there is one

          if all fails, just leave an option for nature to do it for you

          • happymellon•18h

            You have to be careful with that phrase through.

            > using bio-degradable options where there is one

            A lot of "biodegradable" will use a literal interpretation, in that it it degrades in nature. 500 years you say? But it still degrades...

            Home compostable is really the only one that makes sense. Even industrial composting requires a high heat environment as the catalyst, so if something contaminates the batch and goes into general refuse then it will never break down.

            • charcircuit•16h

              500 years is only a blink in Earths lifespan.

              • happymellon•14h

                But its a lot longer than most people expect biodegradable to mean.

          • AlexandrB•18h

            Bio degradable packaging is not really suitable for composting yourself. Most of it takes a really long time to break down naturally or requires high composting temperatures that can be hard to achieve in a home compost pile. This is true even for basic stuff like cardboard and paper. You also need a lot of "green"[1] (high nitrogen) composting material to balance out cellulose from packaging.

            The net result is that this is still an industrial process. Though probably less energy-intensive than recycling.

            Source: we have a compost pile and it's not all sunshine and roses.

            [1] https://www.thespruce.com/composting-greens-and-browns-25394...

        • ssl-3•16h

          Organic waste can be reused. Ever watch Human Centipede?

  • MadVikingGod•17h

    The ultimate reason is there isn't economic reason so. It cost's a lot to recycle anything, and most electronics would net you almost nothing valuable.

    Let's look at an example. Let's say your phones main board, which will net a few hundred grams of raw materials. First thing by weight the actual board itself is probably the biggest, if you could perfectly decompose it to it's parts you would have some fiberglass, glue, a few grams of copper, and maybe a trace amount of gold. Next you would have the different components, mostly ICs but let's cover them next. These are mostly plastic with bits of copper, tin, and other more exotic metals. Most of these could be used again, if you can separate them and sort them. There would be a bunch of solder, which maybe could be reused, if you remix it with more flux. Finally, you'll have chips, these could be reused, but only as replacements for the same chip. Getting anything out of these would mostly be removing the bulk of the material which is silicon that's been contaminated with other elements to make the semiconductors. I don't think there is any process right now that could take doped Si and get you anything back. Besides the silicon you have micrograms of gold and other conductors.

    Having put all that down, I think there could be an opportunity to take the bulk components off boards, test and sort them, and sell them in bulk.

    • WheelsAtLarge•7h

      True, it's the reason why most items aren't recycled. By far most items are buried or burnt rather than recycled. Our economic system is setup to minimize the manufacturing costs without considering disposal cost unless it's mandated. I don't think recycling will every be a real thing unless disposal costs become part of the overall price of manufacturing an item. Something that's mostly impossible unless it's mandated and people decide that trash is unacceptable or at least needs to be greatly minimized. Thinking about it, maybe at some point disposal cost will become so expensive that people won't buy new items unless sellers pay for trashing them.

    • poyu•16h

      > opportunity to take the bulk components off boards, test and sort them, and sell them in bulk.

      I think this is already happening in China for certain components.

    • KellyCriterion•16h

      There are stats that in 1t of recycled smartphones is around 200g of Gold, while in mining 1t contains around 2-3% of Gold.

      Does this match somehow?

      • tredre3•13h

        > while in mining 1t contains around 2-3% of Gold

        Where in the world would that be true? That would be 800 - 1000 ounces per ton! As far as I know the best pay dirt produces a handful of ounces per ton, or 0.01%.

      • entropicdrifter•16h

        2-3% of 1 ton is 40-60 pounds of gold, and that's using the smaller, non-metric tons. 200g is about half a pound, so you'd be looking at 80x more gold per ton from traditional mining on the low end

        • KellyCriterion•44m

          https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/16/6/2509

          "Indeed, a natural ore mine can produce 5 g of gold (Au) per ton of ore, while 200–250 g Au can be recovered from the same mass of computer boards (300–350 g Au/t for mobile phones) [6]."

        • ASalazarMX•16h

          And the gold in electronics is usually in microscopically thin layers, so it only makes commercial sense to extract it when other sources become more expensive... and at that point, doing an ecological extraction won't be a top priority.

          Really, the reduce and reuse parts are our best bet, because recycling only delays the inevitable, unless some groundbreaking technological change achieves 100% electronics recycling.

          • KellyCriterion•42m

            https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/16/6/2509

            "Indeed, a natural ore mine can produce 5 g of gold (Au) per ton of ore, while 200–250 g Au can be recovered from the same mass of computer boards (300–350 g Au/t for mobile phones) [6]."

          • wolvoleo•16h

            I think the best way to do this would be to grind it all up and then melt the material and distill it into different components.

            Manually it's indeed not recoverable like that.

  • lgleason•18h

    Repairability would help as well. Many times the only viable option to fix something is to swap a board, or replace the entire item, instead of replacing the one failed component that caused the board to fail, or reflowing the board etc.. Many components also do not offer batteries that can be replaced, such as the magic mouse, so you end up needing to replace the entire item.

    It's interesting how as certain things age, such as cars, cottage industries pop up to do just that when new replacement boards and parts are not available.

    The other issue is cost cutting. Many components are made cheaply and fail pre-maturely. Great examples of this are mains voltage LED bulbs where the rectifier circuits that power the LED's fail, but the only real option is to replace the entire thing, creating a lot of e-waste in the process.

    • lefra•18h

      Changing the PCB for a known-good one: $10 + maybe half an hour of low-skill work.

      Changing the failing component: maybe a few minutes, probably a few hours of an electronics engineer that's familiar with the design (plus his expensive tools). He's probably bad at soldering, so you'll need someone else to do that. Then you need to revalidate the board.

      It almost never make economical sense to try to repair the board.

      • AngryData•14h

        If we were provided board and part diagrams it might be worth it because then you don't need an actual engineer or super highly knowledgeable person to waste a few hours of time just to diagnose most problems. But because we lack such diagrams whoever is diagnosing it also has to reverse engineer how it works in their head.

      • bigyabai•17h

        If you have a surplus of donor components, board-level repair can be very feasible and often even profitable depending on the board.

      • duped•16h

        The fact that we tolerate creating waste because it's "economical" is frankly disgusting. The disposal fees for e waste should make it uneconomical to dispose of boards.

        Also training techs to repair SMD parts is really easy and cheap, you're grossly overestimating the costs. The real waste comes from boards with designs that can't be repaired so we tolerate a certain yield. For many small devices the yields are shockingly low.

        The other thing is that yields are low because of bad designs. If it became uneconomical for you to throw half your boards out then designers would fix their crappy boards with tombstoned jellybean parts because they used shitty footprint libraries. This is a solvable engineering problem and it's gross that it's cheaper to throw shit into a landfill instead of fixing it.

        • kube-system•16h

          > The fact that we tolerate creating waste because it's "economical" is frankly disgusting.

          I don't think anyone here is suggesting we "tolerate" it, but describing the economic incentives that exist.

          > The disposal fees for e waste should make it uneconomical to dispose of boards.

          I can't think of any number that you could pick that wouldn't either be ineffective, or cause unintended effects. At $10, that's a drop in the bucket compared to labor costs of component level repair. At $100, you're going to see the local lake filled with obsolete cell phones, which is even worse than them being in a landfill.

    • kube-system•16h

      I'm all for repairability, but as labor costs go up and manufacturing costs go down, the window for which there is incentive to repair narrows.

      e.g. there's no amount of repairability design that you could apply to a $3 light bulb which would encourage people to pay someone western wages to repair. I think we're better off lobbying for better standards to communicate the quality of a bulb's design. The whole reason we have crappy LED bulbs to begin with is because the $3 overdriven bulb with crap components jammed into a tiny enclosure looks like a better deal on the shelf than a bulky $20 bulb with a large heat sink and lower output.

      And the labor required to do component level repair is wildly expensive and limited (YouTubers who do it on principle notwithstanding), even further narrowing that window.

      • AngryData•14h

        If you could disassemble and diagnose a failing $3 bulb in 60 seconds, you wouldn't need to hire someone at western wages to fix it. But because it is glued together to not be taken apart, and there are no diagrams for how anything in it works or is put together, it isn't worth the time even if you have a station and equipment all ready setup and replacement component on hand. 95% of the time fixing electronics is just figuring out how they were put together in the first place so you can diagnostically trace along the circuit.

        Not that I think lightbulbs are probably worth saving, but expand it to any other device which gets exponentially more complex and it is easy to see why they don't get diagnosed, not to mention repaired. With a board diagram I can point at a spot on the board and say "I should see 15 volts here", without a board diagram i gotta draw out and figure out how the power supply even works so I know what it is suppose to be outputting and then trace that all the way to the test point to make sure there isn't other crap inline before then that might change what I see.

        • kube-system•12h

          > If you could disassemble and diagnose a failing $3 bulb in 60 seconds, you wouldn't need to hire someone at western wages to fix it.

          Sure, I would. Maybe a lot of people on this forum would. But we're 0.0001% of people that use light bulbs. Our personal persuasions are pretty irrelevant in context. And most of the time it doesn't make financial sense for us to do it, it is just personally satisfying.

          The vast majority of people have no interest in repairing their own electronics, period. If it is cheap to replace, they will just get a new one. If it was a big investment, then it's important enough to call a professional to fix. In the middle ground you've got people who will ask their handy nephew to try to fix it before they run out to the store, and he'll open it up and look for a blown fuse or a loose wire before giving up. The type of people who can do board level repairs are so rare as to be completely irrelevant to the waste stream of electronics.

          Even if we repaired 100% of broken electronics, we'd only make a tiny dent in the volume of waste electronics. Most electronics simply fall out use before they ever break.

          • AngryData•11h

            If they had board diagrams or schematics that nephew could do a lot more than simply look for a blown fuse or wire. Nobody looks deeper than that because they know it is a waste of time without any reference materials.

            No it doesn't solve all the problems, but how many TVs now sit in the dump because of the failure of some 1 cent part that nobody could diagnose even if they wanted because they would have to reverse engineer half the board, rather than probe a few different points on the board?

            Appliance repair use to be big business. Did it stop being so because washers and TVs and vacuums became too complicated to understand, or the parts went up in cost, or because $1000 is considered cheap enough of a device to be considered disposable? No. They stopped existing because appliances stopped coming with the reference materials to repair them in a reasonable time and parts are obfuscated from their source so people don't even know what their broken part is half the time. Is that a thermistor, a capacitor, a diode that blew up? Have fun spending the next 2 hours tracing the obfuscated part number down through 5 different suppliers to figure it out because you obviously can't test a broken part and there is no schematic to look at and identify it from.

            • kube-system•9h

              Major appliance repair is very much still a thing, and manufacturers share repair info under their partner programs. But this makes sense because shipping them back for warranty is prohibitively expensive and people are willing to pay a few hundred bucks to fix a couple thousand dollar appliance. They’re still not doing component level repair, because module replacement is still cheaper and more reliable.

              Small appliances and electronics are not repaired as any more much because:

              1. their real price has cratered over the past 50 years

              2. they have more integrated and specialized parts that simply aren’t repairable or available

              3. They have fewer mechanical parts prone to regular failure or which pay the bills for repair shops (belts, timers, etc)

              4. They are far more complicated than their predecessors, and therefore more complicated to diagnose even if you have a schematic

              But yeah, when everyone’s washing machine has a belt transmission and a clunky mechanical timer, they failed all the time and there were repair shops on every corner. But these places weren’t doing the type of work akin to SMD rework on a digital circuits.

    • kerblang•16h

      Try buying an LED flashlight.. when the LED circuitry/bulb goes out, the whole thing's a brick, battery, assembly, everything. You have to throw it all out. The bulb assembly is usually fused to the frame so that it's hard just to recycle that frame.

    • Findecanor•17h

      Human-scale engineering is underrated. It is very satisfying when you can repair something yourself using your hands, without having to need specialist equipment.

      For example when you have a circuit board that can be serviced with a soldering iron, without having to use a microscope or reflow-oven.

      • kube-system•16h

        It is underrated in terms of personal satisfaction. It is overrated in terms of potential impact to municipal waste management.

    • oulipo2•18h

      Exactly! That's what motivated us to design a repairable e-bike battery at https://infinite-battery.com

    • AlexandrB•18h

      Seeing LED bulb reliability rapidly degrade as the technology matured was like seeing the Phoebus Cartel[1] play out in real time.

      [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

      • MostlyStable•18h

        There was a cartel, but this is one of those "more complicated than it appears" situations. In incandescent bulbs, there is a real tradeoff between durability of the bulb, efficiency (lumens/watt), and brightness/quality of the light, for physics reasons you _can't_ improve one without degrading the other.

        Since "quality of light" is a very difficult thing to market, there was an incentive to push "lifetime of the bulb" in marketing and just make the light quality increasingly worse. The cartel attempted to halt that by making everyone agree on a lifetime/quality to hit and not participate in a race to the bottom (and yes, there was also the obvious benefit to the cartel members of increased sales and profits, which they explicitly talked about in internal documents).

        I want to be very clear that I'm anti cartels and I'm not trying to say "so this was all hunky dory", just that this was not (and these things very rarely are) a simple case of "they made the product objectively worse for the sole sake of more money". Instead, they chose a different point on the pareto-frontier of brightness/efficiency/lifespan that also had the benefit of making them more money.

        But yes, LED bulbs are currently mostly garbage and have terrible heat/power management electronics which means that in practice you almost never get anywhere close to the theoretical life span increases (because the electronics die from overheating far before the actual LEDs themselves would go out), and finding out information on how well a given bulb brand does on heat/power management is essentially impossible.

      • coryrc•18h

        I wish we had a Phoebus Cartel to enforce an expected 50k-hour lifetime.

      • schmidtleonard•18h

        TechnologyConnections debunked the Phoebus Cartel a while ago.

        tl;dw incandescent bulbs can be made more efficient and brighter by running them hotter, but this reduces the lifetime. The obvious Nash Equilibrium involves increasingly hot/bright/efficient bulbs and as much lying about lifetime as a typical consumer would accept, which is a lot. The idea behind the Phoebus Cartel was to force honesty on the dimension where it was most likely to disappear. You are free to disapprove of this and reject bulb lifetime policing, but if so you support the "everybody lies" alternative. Pick your poison.

  • danrecht•19h

    Collecting small things from many sources over meaningful distances is hard.

    Separating things made of many materials is hard, especially when some components are hazardous.

    Purifying materials drawn from waste is hard.

    These aren’t impossible challenges, but physical facts of the problem that have kept costs too high for electronics recycling to be widespread.

    Longer lasting electronics that can be repurposed or reused is the lever I’d be most excited to pull here.

    • PaulDavisThe1st•18h

      At some point in the 90s I remember hearing an NPR story about a new startup that was "pioneering" technology that would basically permit atomic/small-molecule level "cat cracking" of just about anything: a furnace that was so hot that everything put inside it broke down to atoms/small-molecules which could then be fractionated off for re-use.

      I was so excited. I was so naive.

      The idea seems to have gone nowhere.

      • ajb•17h

        That one seems like it should fall foul of thermodynamics, I guess. Just melting everything together probably increases entropy to the extent that it's at best like extracting elements from mining ore. Whereas before you do that, there is organisation and substances are more concentrated. Well, that's a bit hand-wavy - perhaps someone with actual knowledge of thermodynamics will comment.

        I think what recyclers do currently is at least break everything into small pieces, some of which might have a decent concentration of something useful

        • PaulDavisThe1st•17h

          Nothing falls afoul of thermodynamics. This is not a closed system - you can inject as much energy into as you have available. Entropy and thermodynamics play no role here, but I would imagine that (a) the cost of the energy require (b) containment technology (c) what happens after you extract a given substance are/were all very involved in its failure.

          This is already done with crude oil, and is called "cat cracking". You heat the crude oil until every component in it becomes gaseous (but still small-molecule) - the smaller the molecules they higher they rise up the "chimney", so you can siphon off particular components at particular heights.

          • ajb•15h

            I wasn't arguing that it is impossible, which as you say, is only true in a closed system. What I was saying was that since you wasted the organisation of the system, sorting it out again is going to take more energy than if you didn't. I think that's a consequence of the fact that you increased the entropy.

        • landl0rd•16h

          It'd work fine if you just ionize everything; easy to separate then. Just hilariously inefficient given the amount of energy required.

          • Ekaros•13h

            And even if you can collect those ions to relatively high purities. It is not often particularly useful. Most of the mass is probably carbon, silica, oxygen, hydrogen and so on. In the end not that much value there compared to virgin or other sources.

      • mcswell•12h

        The Empire Strikes Back: scene where Chewy rescues C-3PO's parts from going into the recycling furnace.

    • tastyfreeze•19h

      Depends on what you are trying to recover. Recovering precious metals from electronics is no more difficult than processing precious metal ore.

      • wongarsu•19h

        Which comes back around to logistics and scale: refining ore is cheap because ore is delivered on multiple 300t haul trucks or in giant trains

        • frankus•16h

          I wonder if part of it is also that mining companies are generally allowed to just leave their tailings in a big pile near the mine rather than have to responsibly dispose of the majority of the ore that has no (or negative) commercial value.

    • Findecanor•17h

      I think that plastic parts, such as enclosures for electronic devices, should have resin identification codes moulded in them — just like plastic packaging does, so they could be recycled too within the same system.

      • JohnFen•15h

        Except that despite those codes on plastic packaging, almost no plastic packaging gets recycled. Most of what you put in the recycling bin just ends up in the landfill. The plastics industry has been scamming us on this point for years.

    • filoeleven•14h

      > Separating things made of many materials is hard, especially when some components are hazardous.

      Make the tech giants building robots solve this problem first.

    • amelius•19h

      > Longer lasting electronics that can be repurposed or reused is the lever I’d be most excited to pull here.

      Capitalists are pulling the lever in the other direction, though. And there's many of them. Or they pay people to pull.

  • matt_heimer•18h

    Ease of recycling is not prioritized during design or manufacturing because there is no monetary incentive (for the manufacturer) to do so it most cases. It would eat into profits. Simple as that.

    Unless a component is expensive to manufactory and recycling/reuse could save the manufacturer money it won't happen. The only real solution are laws requiring it.

    • gtowey•17h

      The full cost of recycling things should be part of the cost of the product at the time of sale.

      What you would find quickly, is that there is little to no profit on the manufacturing and sale of new devices and the value of repairs and reuse would skyrocket.

      Right now companies are allowed to steal money from the future by ignoring the problem of what happens to these devices once they leave the factory. The truth is that they become hazardous waste, and lock away valuable resources inside of trash.

      The reality is that there is no real economic benefit to the current model of ever increasing sales of new goods. But the capitalists, as ever, have been extracting money out of it by making the unpleasant, expensive parts someone else's liability. Namely ours.

      Riches built from value extraction and arbitrage against the future. And most of us cannot conceive of it being any other way.

    • xyst•18h

      It should be regulated to make devices repairable and upgradeable.

      End soldering of components to motherboard. Make service manuals publicly available. Components sold and available.

      • marcosdumay•18h

        At some point, sockets add enough failure modes that making components switchable increases the amount of waste. And it's not a far, theoretical point; it's one we often meet in practice.

        Any regulation about that has to be detail-focused and conservative.

      • addaon•12h

        > End soldering of components to motherboard.

        What do you see as the alternative here? Conductive epoxy is way less repairable than solder. Sockets are… components; and tend to be more expensive and higher failure rate than what’s socketed in them, except for extreme cases of very large ICs. Press fit requires special tooling, so repairability is much worse… what’s left?

      • aristofun•18h

        NO! We have enough regulations already

  • snarfy•19h

    Energy has an environmental cost. If the energy required to recycle is more than the environmental cost it's not worth it.

    • adrianN•18h

      That is true but it is unclear why you believe that to apply to recycling electronics. I doubt anyone can put hard numbers on the environmental costs involved.

    • ahf8Aithaex7Nai•19h

      If the moon is a folding chair, then pigs can fly.

      • RationPhantoms•19h

        If my grandmother had wheels, she would've been a bike.

  • nebula8804•18h

    Well it seems uneven. The materials in electronics are so varied that there seem to be different levels of recycling, hopefully with materials pricing going up the worst forms of recycling can go away.

    China sells a machine for anything you can imagine: Here is a wire grinding machine to recover the copper from wires: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/p_hmDdGIk7g

    PCBs first seem to be cut up before put into similar machines machine above: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WO-VvucMq4E

    https://www.youtube.com/shorts/q_O1EpEcKaM

    Dont know what happens to the ground epoxy resin, maybe mixed with other materials?

  • mahrain•18h

    I was shocked to find that even electronics that are collected in Europe seem to be shipped to Africa, set on fire, and at most, metals are collected from the ashes, including traces of gold and copper. That's about it. Batteries have a bit better recycling path but not by much.

    • SPICLK2•18h

      On the upside, at some point the ground in those infamous electronics "recycling" towns will become so contaminated they'll be able to strip-mine for rare earths!

    • AlexandrB•18h

      A lot of recycling seems to amount to shipping waste overseas so it can be disposed of in jurisdictions with few/no environmental protections. Pretty sad state of affairs.

      https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/waste-recyclables-malaysia-p...

  • ahf8Aithaex7Nai•19h

    The reason is simply that there are not enough incentives for manufacturers to do so. I would be happy if nothing on smartphones was glued together but everything was screwed or plugged in, and if I could simply replace batteries in smartphones and laptops, as was the case in the past. If these things are not made mandatory requirements, the thinner device, the lighter device, the device where the manufacturer can use battery life as the upper limit for device life will win.

    I don't know anything about chips and boards, but in the EU, a regulation will come into force in 2027 that requires batteries in portable devices to be replaceable by the user without special tools.

  • randusername•17h

    I like how threads like this are like a reverse nesting doll. Somebody says the problem is the specific metals, then someone says it is recovery processes, then market forces, then legislation, and I think I spied a comment on thermodynamics.

    I will take a shot in the dark somewhere in the middle. Intellectual property. As long as transparency and standardization are disincentivized it will be pretty hard to orchestrate un-building anything.

    I wonder if we're converging on all products becoming "good enough" that the pace of innovation will slow and this will change for the better?

    • tonymet•16h

      tear apart even the most primitive device with a plastic shell, lcd , pcb and power supply . None of those separate components are easily "recycled" .

      The concept that materials are Recyclable by default is just a myth. It's very hard to turn waste into a refined and usable input material to produce another quality product that meets consumer expectations.

  • JohnFen•19h

    Short answer: it's too expensive.

    But us hobbyists can help out. I get about half of my electronic components for free or close to free by parting out electronics that others are throwing away or sending to e-waste centers.

  • emsign•18h

    It comes down to entropy and cost of labour. It takes more work to undo entropy turning a complex material mix which is either an appliance still intact or crushed and mixed even more back into its raw materials.

    Processing mineral ores into raw materials is cheaper.

    So the only way is to regulate market, meaning forcing companies to put in the extra work.

    Currently these regulations tend to be circumvented by illegally exporting e-waste into countries with cheap labour, no such regulations or corruption (usually all at the same time).

  • pibaker•14h

    If you buy ICs from a Chinese source, there is a good chance you will get something desoldered from e-waste. People don't like it unless they have no choice because there is less guarantee it actually works plus there is the ick factor.

    Anything less valuable than an IC is probably not worth the labor required to recycle it.

    On a side note, it is funny to see posters demanding that the company pay for the full recycling cost of their devices. We required the nuclear industry to do the same with nuclear waste and reactor decommission. The result is artificially inflating the cost of one of the best ways to cleanly generate electricity to the point that it became uneconomical to built nuclear so we ended up burning more coal instead. Be careful with second order effects of your feel good solutions to complicated problems.

    • macarabaua2k26•14h

      > The result is artificially inflating the cost of one of the best ways to cleanly generate electricity to the point that it became uneconomical

      Source of this?

  • adrian_b•18h

    Everything is very unrecyclable, because there are no laws forcing true recycling.

    Designing something to be recyclable and also designing the equipment that could recycle it is much more expensive than designing it to be just dumped as garbage and designing only the equipment needed to make it from pure raw materials.

    Using most materials in closed cycles (except those that can already be recycled efficiently by living beings), which is absolutely necessary for the survival of mankind, will never happen unless mandated by law, because any business tries to push such costs to someone else.

    Recycling will happen only when the sales of any object will be forbidden, unless the raw materials from which it has been made, besides a list of exceptions, can be recovered in a very high proportion, e.g. 99% and someone will be liable if this does not happen.

    Obviously, if such laws will ever be adopted, they would have to implemented very gradually, i.e. there should be a grace period of several years, and then the mandated efficiency of recycling should be initially very low, with a plan to raise every few years. Similarly, the number of exceptions might be initially large, but then some of the exceptions should be eliminated when adequate technologies are developed.

    For now, there is no serious research in true recycling technologies, which really reverse the fabrication process of a product, because there are neither any money to be gained from having such technologies, nor any money to be lost from not having such technologies.

    Electronics devices are harder to recycle completely than almost anything else, because besides materials that are used in great quantities, e.g. plastic, copper and silicon, there are a lot of chemical elements that are used in minute quantities, e.g. arsenic, antimony, germanium, hafnium, cobalt, tungsten and many others.

    Those elements, even if they are much more valuable than the major elements from an electronic device, are also much more difficult to extract from a device, because of their very low proportion.

  • tjwebbnorfolk•19h

    Recycling stuff is hard, expensive, and energy-intensive. Why should electronics be uniquely recyclable?

    We need to get past this idea that just because recycling makes you feel good must mean it IS good. Most of the time recycling stuff uses more CO2 than simply throwing it into a hole and making another one.

  • steve1977•19h

    I guess one aspect is that electronics are not one homogeneous thing but often very complex composites of many things, bonded together in a way so that they can resist the temperature etc. that they operate under.

    That's very different from say a newspaper, a glass bottle or a Coca Cola can.

  • lacker•12h

    In general electronics aren't recycled because people don't care about recycling them.

    The easiest piece of electronics equipment to recycle is probably an iPhone. You can give an old iPhone to Apple and they will recycle it for free. But still most end-of-life iPhones are not recycled.

  • AngryData•14h

    If things are hard or impossible to repair, that means they are even harder and more impossible to recycle. If we built devices to be repaired, not only would less of them get trashed to start with, but the stuff that does get trashed would be much easier to recycle.

  • allinonetools_•18h

    A big issue is that most electronics are optimized for cost and performance, not disassembly. Once components are tightly integrated and bonded together, separating materials becomes economically harder than producing new ones. Design-for-recycling would need to be a requirement early in the product lifecycle.

  • iancmceachern•18h

    Because they are so manufacturable.

    When we design these things (which I do for a living) we often find we are forced into tradeoffs between repairability/recycleability and manufacturability/cost. The market wants cheaper and cheaper things. To accommodate we need to make them less repairable and recyclable.

    • makapuf•17h

      Infortunately, this is where free market stops being a good optimizer and manual settings (laws) need to apply by requiring raiparability, which is difficult (but not completely impossible) to quantify.

  • erelong•16h

    Probably more nonprofits could be started that just cost extra money to recycle stuff (like, you might not be able to make it into a business where the recycled stuff pays for itself, but people might be willing to pay to prevent e-waste from being created)

  • pkilgore•18h

    Not to be glib, but the second law of thermodynamics.

    You are attempting to filter out trace amounts valuable dopants and some small amounts of metals with value from, essentially, a pile of sand.

    This is not energetically or chemically easy.

    • marcosdumay•18h

      The second law of thermodynamics is very forgiving here. It's actually not the problem. Energy depends on the log of the concentration.

      The problem is with our technology; we don't know how to recycle things well.

  • grigio•13h

    Because the States and the "Green" companies earn more money reselling the entire product again instead just the parts

  • nottorp•14h

    Because someone at Apple still has a fetish for thinner than it's actually needed, and the other manufacturers just copy that.

  • main-protect•12h

    I suppose it's because it's too complex and requires too much effort to unravel.

  • Analemma_•19h

    Recycling works best when you have a big lump of bulk material which can be melted down and reforged/recast. Aluminum cans are some of the best objects for recycling because apart from the labels they are almost pure aluminum, and so you just toss them in a furnace and get the constituent material back.

    Electronics are the exact opposite of this: they’re highly heterogenous, with bits of material scattered all over the place. Also, most of that material isn’t particularly valuable: silicon is literally as abundant as sand. So all you can really do is melt it all into slag or dissolve it in acid and then try to extract the trace amounts of valuable bits like gold, but this is so energy-intensive for so little material that it’s not worth it at any reasonable material price.

  • lgleason•19h

    repairability would help quite a bit. How many times do you have to replace an entire board in something when replacing just a component would actually fix things?

  • tonymet•16h

    The concept of Recycling ( nearly all the materials can be reused with little cost or impact) is a myth. There are relatively few consumer products or materials that are readily recycled.

    It's not so much that electronics are unrecyclable, it's that nearly everything is unrecyclable.

    Recycling is nearly a fantasy. For the most part it has been a campaign for waste management firms to charge customers double while demanding they separate their own garbage, and punish them for doing it wrong. The charade lasted so long because much of the "recycling" was dumped in Asia and ended up in the ocean from there.

    • JohnFen•15h

      True.

      In the US, anyway, the recyclable things are paper, glass, steel, aluminum, and asphalt.

  • irishcoffee•17h

    Did you know only about 5% of plastic in the US is recycled? The rest is floating in the ocean or not degrading in landfills.

    Plastic.

    • kube-system•16h

      I'm surprised it is that high. Plastic is cheap to produce, and the quality of plastic from US recyclers is poor. It is so infamously dirty that China banned importing recycled plastic from the US. By the time you wash the peanut butter out of each peanut butter jar, you've spent more in water and labor than the plastic is worth.

      But ultimately, landfills are a good place to put plastic. It sequesters the carbon and keeps the pollution contained.

    • tonymet•16h

      not sure why this has been downvoted. The real answer is "nothing is".

  • westurner•11h

    Electronic waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_waste

    From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44269481 :

    > From "Turning waste into gold" (2024) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/02/240229124612.h... :

    >> Researchers have recovered gold from electronic waste. Their highly sustainable new method is based on a protein fibril sponge, which the scientists derive from whey

    /? e-waste: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

    "“Toasterlike” Process Recovers Rare Earths From E-waste: Flash joule heating can recover important magnet metals" (2026) FJH https://spectrum.ieee.org/rare-earth-minerals-recycling-ewas...

    Hydrogen plasma and hydrogen cold plasma can recycle plastic with less energy than FJH, FWIU.

    I have some notes on a semiconductor fabrication process with just sustainable inputs: Ethyl Lactate, Lignin-Vitrimer, Nitrogen, CO2, Laser-induced Graphene, A-CNT, PCLP Photo-cleavable Lignin Polymer, Hexyl Cellulose

    But A-CNT need to be encased in something to prevent health hazard if they burn. Phytic acid from e.g. Bran seed is high in phosphorous which might prevent health risks of CNT.

  • MengerSponge•16h

    Thermodynamics: it's hard to unmix cake batter.

  • xyst•18h

    recyclable and reusable aren’t profitable for companies. They want you hooked on buying the latest incremental/minute change.

    If companies like Apple cared truly cared about the environment. We would have phones, laptops with easily repairable and upgradeable hardware.

    Framework is the closest we have come to having a thin profile laptop and easily repairable and upgradeable hardware.

  • GuinansEyebrows•19h

    bluntly: a lack of regulation mandating that consumer goods manufacturing responsibilities cover the lifecycle of the goods (including end-of-life).

    yes i'm fully aware that recycling components is difficult and costly; if you truly believe in the market as an innovating force, you could stand to be a little more optimistic that we could make this a reality :)

    • Joel_Mckay•18h

      You obviously are not in manufacturing.

      USB-C charger reuse is now common (Apple chargers still gets the UK/EU law exemption)

      RoHS prevents Pb content in recycled parts (less toxic waste)

      Lithium battery recycling drop bins are next to the store entrance (financial incentives)

      ATX12V/EPS12V power supply in your PC is a standard component between motherboards

      Aluminum and steel instead of plastics is common (consumers like the aesthetics too)

      Under the guise of recycling, problems arise when third-world people use vats of acid to strip trace gold/platinum from electronics. Others strip, relabel (laser marking), and resell aged chips as new stock... this can cause safety/reliability problems.

      Some firms now use solder centrifuges to extract RoHS solder off parts, and resell the tin bar-solder back to manufacturers.

      e-Waste can be a desirable resource, but few people want old Lead contaminated CRT or mixed plastic filled with inserts etc.

      Companies like AMD with AM5 compatibility across chip generations should get an award for their great work reducing waste. Linux <6.0.8 kept a lot of laptops out of the landfills too, but now kernel >6.0.15 will no longer support old GPU/Laptops as NVIDIA ends legacy driver support. =3