[mysterydip]

What I don't get is there's millions of "good enough" e-waste motherboards, RAM, CPUs etc. out there. Wouldn't recycling be better than having nothing or waiting indefinitely? Are there that many workloads that can only run on brand new hardware?

[crote]

It depends.

First of all, we aren't really talking about motherboards or CPUs here. It is embedded electronics, not desktop computing. They are highly specialized application-specific electronics, which require a lot of engineering time to design, validate, and certify. It is nothing at all like the computer ecosystem, where you can just swap in a different motherboard. Boards are designed to use very specific chips, with a chip swap easily costing tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Second, the chip shortage is mostly affecting "legacy" chips - which have often been available for a decade or more. The applications they are being used in do not really require a lot of processing power, but they do need to be extremely reliable. We are talking about things like Atmel's ATmega32u4, which was initially released in 2008. Can't really do a lot, but plenty of power for some obscure automotive module.

Although recycling is technically sort-of possible, it is extremely labor-intensive. Even with the current shortage and associated price hike, it isn't really economically viable. Even worse, the resulting chips are of unknown quality: you simply don't know what happened to them! And exhaustively testing them isn't really possible either. Are you willing to buy a car with an airbag controller which contains a chip they dug out of a landfill? Newly manufactured hardware has a known quality, which means you can guarantee it works properly.

On the other hand, we are wasting a lot of opportunities on the other side of the usage cycle. Electronics can often be repaired, but we throw them away instead. Look at smartphone and laptop manufacturers, for example: often they just throw out an entire logic board when a single chip is defective. A skilled technician could replace that chip, but smartphone and laptop manufacturers are actively trying to obstruct this. It is "reduce, reuse, recycle" for a reason: recycling should be the the last resort - not the first.

[giantrobot]

> Electronics can often be repaired, but we throw them away instead.

A skilled technician replacing a 2¢ part on a $10 board costs more than a new $10 board. Just disassembling that board to recycle parts off of it will cost more than the board originally cost to manufacture.

You also run into the same argument against landfill airbag controllers. A factory that produces a million boards can have very good reliability metrics. A skilled technician not only has more variable output but less accurate quality metrics unless they put a lot of extra effort into process controls.

A recycled board will cost more and be statistically less reliable from a brand new board. It would be more efficient to just mechanically separate them to extract raw materials.

[crote]

Oh, absolutely! Which is why I explicitly specified "smartphone and laptop".

Replacing a $0.02 part on a $10 board doesn't make sense, but why aren't we replacing $0.02 parts on $500+ boards?

[giantrobot]

Refurbishment already happens. If you drop you get a replacement iPhone there's a decent chance it's a refurbished phone and not just a produced-for-replacement phone. Apple doesn't just toss a broken phone in a wood chipper. Same with most manufacturers. But that's the whole item and not logic boards and such.

A whole board needs to be pretty valuable to replace a 2¢ part because the technician's time is expensive. A 2¢ part that takes an hour to replace and test is $40-50 in skilled technician labor. That assumes you know exactly what 2¢ part needs to be replaced. Every technician hour adds a premium onto a refurbished board. Even a skilled technician can also screw up a repair so the rate of failed repairs also adds a premium. As does shipping and storage on the repaired units.

If you design boards to be more easily be repaired by a technician you're adding test leads and headers that cost money and take up space. In a phone that eats into your envelope budget meaning a smaller battery, a larger device, or tighter thermals. Anymore the same is true for laptops.

Even stuff like the Framework laptop doesn't envision people replacing surface mount ICs. They design around LRUs and have people send back old parts to refurbish or recycle.

There's not really any 2¢ parts for smartphones and laptops. There's $100.02 parts including all the expenses. So the part needs to be well over $100.02 in value to the manufacturer to make it worthwhile for them to refurbish it rather than just replace it and recycle the broken unit. A consumer isn't going to spend $100 to fix a $200 phone. They're better off spending $100 on a used replacement and sending the broken device to be recycled.

[stew-j]

Nice writeup, thanks.

> It depends.

I hardly ever give up a computer, we still have a '98 Windows laptop doing recipe duty in the kitchen. (It's getting harder to find a small 32 bit Linux distro these days, though.) Energy efficiency is another concern, one machine I took to be "recycled" (I know--maybe or maybe not) was a Mac G4 which was good as a space heater in the winter, but that's about it--and I didn't feel like moving it 1500 miles with our latest relocation.

I started with electronics many years ago, and would balk at replacing a surface mount chip, but people could learn basic electronic repair literacy for things that commonly break like cords which would help a lot. I also don't tend to buy products like smart phones which are glued together and difficult to repair.

As for RISC-V, it is hard to find even a dev board with the chip shortages (I bought a HiFive Inventor kit to experiment with as a first project):

https://www.hifiveinventor.com/

[fipar]

I think that's a good idea but then companies doing that wouldn't be able to sell their products as new, and we probably need a cultural shift before widespread adoption of refurbished and used products is doable.

Additionally, and not knowing much about the hardware side of things, if I put myself in the shoes of a manufacturer, it seems challenging to ship a product where the expected lifetime of some of its components is unknown. Support and warranties would be affected too.

[mysterydip]

Those are fair points. With the amount of e-waste currently in existence I'd think we would want to address those sooner rather than later, but it's easy for everyone to just kick the can down the road.

[galleywest200]

It may be more prudent for us to perfect our material extraction process to reuse these metals and plastics, as opposed to reusing the same piece of hardware. Once that is done, we could probably have e-cycling be picked up by trash collectors just like regular recycling.

[Consultant32452]

I feel like this could be reasonable for boutique production, but if you're dumpster diving it may be difficult to order millions of exactly the same part this way.

[cptskippy]

You can't really slap an AT motherboard in an LED light bulb and call it a day. Fabs produce all manner of chips, not just GPUs and CPUs.

Over the last 40 years all manner of circuits composed of discrete components have been replaced with chips. Voltage regulation is a chip, battery protection is a chip, rectification is a chip.

[mysterydip]

Good point. What about repurposing FPGAs?

[crote]

Barely anyone uses FPGAs. They are pretty much only in use in highly specialized enterprise-grade hardware. Think a €5000 SSL accelerator.

[tverbeure]

For many FPGAs, the cost of the additional power supply controllers will be more than the cost of a full microcontroller solution.

[cptskippy]

Not all Chips are digital logic. In fact most are not. An FPGA is reprogrammable logic. You can not replace a rectifier or regulator with an FPGA.

That's kind of like suggesting someone use a stapler (not a staple) when they need a lag bolt because "well they're both steel".