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?
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.
If it can't be unlocked, it can't be sold. That should be the law.
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)
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.
This is why reduce and reuse are important.
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.
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...
Of course that’s not to say there are no problems with the process.
Refuse, reduce, reuse, recyle, rot.
I think it’s twice as better.
Anyway, "rot" is a good one.
Seems like change for change's sake.
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.
I think this is already happening in China for certain components.
Does this match somehow?
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was so excited. I was so naive.
The idea seems to have gone nowhere.
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
Make the tech giants building robots solve this problem first.
Capitalists are pulling the lever in the other direction, though. And there's many of them. Or they pay people to pull.
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.
End soldering of components to motherboard. Make service manuals publicly available. Components sold and available.
Any regulation about that has to be detail-focused and conservative.
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?
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.
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.
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?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/waste-recyclables-malaysia-p...
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.
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.
In the US, anyway, the recyclable things are paper, glass, steel, aluminum, and asphalt.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
Yeah, I was thinking of something like that. If there are fewer chemical components, recycling gets easier.
Before looking into Lignin I was looking at deoxidizing rGO reduced graphene oxide with hydrogen plasma.
I learned that the work functions of graphene and CNT are actually sufficiently different such that the graphene could be a substrate for CNT FET without the charge jumping out of the gate to the board. Salt apparently dissipates electric discharge about as well as silicon.
But a plasma process would probably have a lower yield rate unless there are masks, which are expensive to fab but maybe necessary to compete at production scale.
Monolithic chip fab is slower but the fabrication plant CapEx and OpEx are lower.
LCS SLM with LCoS, CO2 fiber laser / Yb Laser, plain old DUV
Some helpful prompts for a sustainablefactory agent skill:
Identify and redesign to eliminate production health hazards and environmental hazards
Find and compare sustainable alternatives, workarounds, substitutes for
Consider cellulose, graphene CNT and other carbon allotropes, CO2, nitrogen
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.
Source of this?
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.
Leaching is the big issue. Recycling solar panels is going to keep getting more important. Maybe if there was a way to lock-up the metals with additives [2], or make everything a mushroom substrate?
"Mycologists estimate that we have only catalogued about 5% to 10% of the world's fungi." There's probably some solutions in that world. [3]
[1] https://gemini.google.com/share/a32152a6e84e
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.
That's very different from say a newspaper, a glass bottle or a Coca Cola can.
Plastic.
But ultimately, landfills are a good place to put plastic. It sequesters the carbon and keeps the pollution contained.
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.
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.
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.
The problem is with our technology; we don't know how to recycle things well.
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.
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 :)
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
