Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rvense 2183 days ago
"Recycling" in the context of electronics means that a few rare minerals (gold) get extracted, and the rest (ie. almost everything) ends up in landfills or as filler for roads at best. It's a very energy intensive process with often murky environmental effects, and defintely not just "used to make nee iPhones". Unfortunately!

That's why the phrase is "reduce, reuse, and if all else fails, recycle" and why Apple (and others) are indeed in the wrong when they don't design their products for repairability and long life.
2 comments
AnIdiotOnTheNet 2183 days ago
Unfortunately modern computing trends make "reuse" pretty difficult too, what with software bloat and increasing layers of abstraction ensuring that everything becomes slower and slower over time, possibly just so that you will buy new hardware. Wastefulness in computing is a decade+ long epidemic.

Not that long ago users here were talking about 3 seconds to launch a word processor being "pretty good", which is an insane statement to make when you're taking about multicore processors that can execute multiple instructions per cycle and run at 3 billion cycles per second. Modern software is the computing equivalent of burning rainforests to roast marshmallows.

link
nitrogen 2183 days ago
Wastefulness in computing is a decade+ long epidemic.

Comedians were making songs about endless upgrades back in the 90s.

link
tomatotomato37 2183 days ago
Isn't that just for the boards and more awkward components though? It seems like it would be trivial to strip most of the surface mounted components off via just heating and shaking
link
rvense 2183 days ago
For manual repairs it's certainly viable for some components, but it takes some care to not end up with tiny passives stuck to everything - if you literally just shake (or more, likely, scrape) everything off the board you'll get an absolute mess. And then you don't know if things end up damaged (or were damaged before, if you're talking about e-waste). It's not really something that works at scale. Even in the simplest case it's labour-intensive, so it's not economical in the vast majority of cases. Not for SoCs, certainly not for smaller things that cost singular cents, or less.

To reuse components in new products you'd have to harvest, clean off the old solder paste (reball in the case of BGAs), and sort everything, and then repackage them for pick-n-placing again. And if you're talking about more than just Apple reusing Apple products, there's also quite a lot of varieties of components.

link