I would have thought someone would have found a better way to recycle the base materials in that stuff...
...
Sure - except it would be expensive.
There isn't a whole lot of any one material in any of these things, perhaps with the exception of a plastic case, and a glass screen.
And they're mostly bonded together pretty firmly. In the case of the PCB, the parts are soldered together, or else encased inside each other.
Burning is usually used with these things, as it's a quick way to get rid of everything but the metals.
I'm pretty sure they could have used the parts from that E-waste to make other stuff...
The individual components? Not really.
- Most of those parts can only be soldered a few times. So you'd need to reheat them to get the parts off,sort the parts, verify that they work, and then put them back into reels, and resolder them, after which they likely could not be reheated to soldering temperatures again without incurring permanent damage. By this point, a resistor's cost has gone from $0.0005 to $0.19. (Yes, these things can cost 5% of one cent, or less. I'm looking at a US-based online store right now, and they've got name-brand resistors for $0.00103 each in high quantities. If you're sourcing in China, direct from your buddy's factory a mile away, $0.0005 each is probably on the high side.)
- Designing a device around an older model of component, such as a screen, or processor, limits your new design's capabilities. Might as well just put a new decal on the existing model and call it "Special Edition."
So in short, the manufacturing end of this would just not work out with reusing the components, unless you want a $200 phone to cost closer to $3000, be less reliable, and be very similar in its capabilities to last year's models.
and hey, if you are going to trash it anyway, why not build something with the e-waste that Ghanans can use instead of putting them at risk of developing diseases and having them live around this shit.
Many components are also unmarked, or may even be marked with proprietary part numbers, done specifically to make them difficult to reverse-engineer. Beside that, it's not just plug-n-play for these parts or devices - no more than you can take an iPhone2 charger and use it on an iPhone5. For example,
this simple $4 chip has a user manual that is 560 pages long. The chips they use in these phones can be far more capable and complex than that.
And then you're back to the cost thing anyway, with the old junk possibly being expensive to service and get working again, or to get it working with some other device.
And there's just the usability end. Got an old 80MB hard drive sitting around? With a mere 12,500 of them, and probably a 150,000 watt power supply, I can build myself a 1TB array.
So...no, not a lot of
cheap solutions to this, besides taking advantage of 3rd-world countries with no concern for deaths or disabilities due to severe pollution, and extremely low labor prices - or investing extensively in automated processing systems here in the US. Most robots don't get cancer.
Facebook
Twitter