E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet
bbc.com
bbc.com
Because either I am guessing this article is delusional, or they're completely ignoring the part where the dirty messy work gets done by people in a poor country for $1/hour wages.
Just this week, ECS Refining, Apple's main recycler in California, shut down. All of their unprocessed material is now the responsibility of their landlord. https://resource-recycling.com/e-scrap/2018/07/03/ecs-refini...
https://theintercept.com/2016/05/10/gps-tracking-devices-cat...
Yes, there are lots of people who legally refine precious metals from electronics and make a living. There are also lots of people who are middlemen and sell it to others.
High value metals like gold are refined by LOTS of companies.
"Mining " gold from dumps could be very productive because the concentration is MUCH higher in electronics than in the most productive gold mine. Profitable Gold mines typically mine and process an average of more than 2000-4000 pound of ore to obtain one ounce of gold!
It is much more environmentally conscious (In some instances more profitable) to recycle electronics than to mine for precious metals.
Even in the poorest countries labour costs are at a minimium of 1 USD an hour.
If working 48 hour weeks, 1 USD per hour is $208 per month, which is a modestly good wage in some places. Not really the minimum, although probably so for a very dirty and unpleasant job in a recycling factory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_count...
From the junk pile, we sell by weight to recyclers who either break the items down into recyclable parts themselves, or sell them on to firms that handle what they can't, including extracting rare metals from circuit boards. To my knowledge, such firms are based here in the US, but I don't know enough about that side of the chain to name any.
Refurbishing or selling for parts is MUCH more valuable than metals recycling. It's also MUCH MUCH more work.
Three first problem is getting valuable E-waste at a good price. (Free or cheap in large quantities) then comes separating out older parts (higher gold content), then identifying and testing newer parts for refurbishing or parts sales. Then advertising refurb or parts, then the sale, then support for the items you sold.
While there are a LOT of parts in closets, basements or other storage, it is difficult to obtain products that have a high resale value at the right price.
Then factor in that newer computers and phones are getting much faster and/or using less power.
Also, recycling does have risks-- including dust, toxic fires, and safe disposal.
It's not impossible to make money recycling/refurbishing, but it is difficult and usually requires scale.
This part is hard for me, as a big proponent of "reduce, reuse, recycle." Reduce isn't that hard until your technology becomes obsolete. Reuse is typically impossible because people don't throw out technology until it's obsolete. So recycling is the only option left.
People throw out computers (including screens and everything) because the mouse stopped working, or the power supply needs replacing or the computer got a virus. A washing machine needs a new door-seal, a cooker needs a new light, people actually throw out that sort of stuff. Ebay has helped to make a market for junk, but oftentimes it seems people over-estimate the financial value of their used stuff and that hinders reuse in favour of replacement.
It’s a difficult economic issue. Suitably skilled repairmen only exist medium economies, where we produce enough income to teach youngsters soldering, but when the economy is not developed as much as to have marketers take the power over the makers (think Juicero). In the Western economy today, repairmen are more salesmen on the field than actual people capable of repairing anything. I’ve never seen one actually repairing an appliance.
I have my doubt whether it’s really the machines getting built in such a way that repairs are impossible, oftentimes it does seem like a little more search could have found the defective wire, but let’s be honest, if they want to survive in a big city, soldering won’t pay enough. And that’s where the economy is surprising. Somehow those repairman jobs have higher hourly rates than replacing the machine, meaning shipping a new 50-kg appliance across the world is less costly than shipping a repairman across New York.
It is so frustrating to know that all something likely needs is a small surface component, but you can't repair it. Usually this is due to components being epoxied or dipped for seemingly no reason. At least thanks to ebay, you can sometimes find a duplicate broken device that can be harvested for whole PCBs.
I think with a small team of quite knowledgeable people you can have different revenue streams
- stupid repairs (failing buttons, so common)
- parts (where the team would be here to create test tooling)
- materials (here you'd need chemistry knowledge)
We're getting some charities working to help people make repairs, some maker-spaces and such that facilitate people doing it themselves, etc..
Some people do a great job. Check out recraigslist.com and applianceschool.com (same person runs both) for examples of how to refurb/ flip large appliances at scale.
The blind center of lad Vegas is another successful organisation that refurbished at scale.
Computer repair and cell phone repair stores are another example of successful refurbishing at scale...
One of the biggest problems is that individuals and businesses hoard old electronics... Loss aversion (the fear of losing something perceived as valuable) is a big reason that more electronics aren't refurbished or recycled. Fear of data theft is another, smaller reason that more electronics aren't recycled.
In the end, there are a lot of pros and a lot of cons to this business... because it is difficult to be consistently successful, there is a lot of opportunity. There are a lot of ways to make money in the recycling industry. Finding and developing a niche that other people can't or don't want to do-- that has a high upside -- can be a great way to make a good living.
If you want to jump on, there is little risk --- mostly just a trip to the metals yard.
Maybe you can use a financial hedging contract to lock in the price of alu?
It’s a penny game. If you are making a 35% spread on your buy/sell the one time inventory depreciation will definitely hurt, but your spread and net pennies per pound has also gone down substantially as well.
I would guess that some day, mining materials in a garbage dump would be more profitable than mining them from the ground.
Seeing as processor speeds have pretty much plateaued [1], I wonder if it is useful to start thinking less in terms of precious metals and instead in potential processing power of e-waste. I remember a discussion on here about cheap web host providers using consumer grade boxes as servers. With today's cluster technologies, there's certainly creative applications for processing power that would end up in a landfill.
[1] https://www.maketecheasier.com/why-cpu-clock-speed-isnt-incr...
If anything, electricity production probably has more subsidies & externalities than semiconductor manufacture.
Power consumption in mainstream CPUs has been a few picojoules per instruction since the Pentium. Even the MSP430 is almost a pJ/insn. Modern ultra-low-power CPUs like the STM32L reach down below 0.3 pJ/insn, as did the LPC1110 a decade ago. Its more mainstream STM32F siblings are still stuck at 1.5 pJ/insn. Research CPUs using exotic logic families have been below 0.05 pJ/insn since 2000, but are too slow for mass adoption.
Power reduction this millennium is almost entirely about changing architecture to GPUs and other more specialized hardware, using wider registers (with SIMD instructions at times) and being smarter about turning things off and ramping their clocks.
Concurrently we've seen a huge move from languages like C and Java to languages like JS (10x the computational load of C even with JIT) and Python (200x, or 5x if your program is dominated by Numpy.)
So power usage is not a big reason for not using CPUs from 5 years ago.
The number one slowdown I've seen in rendering web pages, were not bad algorithms or bad programming languages, but bad database queries.
And if that's the case, there is a lot more optimization in the DB to be gained than rewriting your back-end to C, say.
Yes, all things equal, it's better to write faster CPU-bound code. In a world in which writing optimal machine code all the time was possible without sacrificing anything else important, then we would always want to do it. This is hardly a controversial conclusion.
The reason we don't write faster CPU-bound code is that, in the world we live in, all things are never equal. Correctness, security, maintainability, development velocity, portability, engineering culture/trends, and so on are usually more important than raw CPU performance.
But it's not true today, because today hand-tuned assembly is slow compared to what you can do on the GPU or an FPGA or a TPU.
And, of course, it's not true that you should do this if you can't spend unlimited time writing your code. It's entirely reasonable to use slower languages like Python and JS if you can hack faster as a result. Since many of us are taking that entirely reasonable option, the number of CPU cycles needed to run basic applications is going up, which increases power consumption.
That's not how thing work. GPUs/TPUs aren't magic, they don't speed everything up: they are really good is some scenario, but they are really slow in many others: the cost of loading memory to the GPU and back from it has a huge cost and it's only worth it if the GPU has enough work to do with the workload.
In theory, you could write a web server that runs on the GPU (at least a majority of it, it will still need some CPU work obviously), but it would be incredibly slow, probably slower than if it was a regular web server running on a machine from the 90s.
FPGA are totally different beasts, you can theoretically speed up anything with them, but
1. that requires a LOT of work, and
2. they aren't new: anything you can do with FPGA today, you could do it in 1995 already.
I don't doubt that but on today's web stacks you use either MySQL or Postgres typically and both those are written in C.
Yes, you can create your own DB written in a low level language, but you'll be hitting the same issues that the DB solves for you (indexing upon insertions, query optimizations, transactional operations, etc).
For CPUs at idle, able to turn off power to accessories, power consumption has gone down dramatically over the last decade. True, the curve has been flattening over the last 5 years, but it's still noticeable.
All my power numbers here were off by three orders of magnitude. The MSP430 uses almost a nanojoule per instruction, not almost a picojoule.¹ The Pentium used 10 nanojoules per instruction, not 10 picojoules.² The STM32L011x3/4 uses 0.23 nJ per instruction, not 0.23 pJ.³ The LPC1110 uses 0.3 nJ per instruction, not 0.3 pJ.⁴ Research CPUs using exotic logic families have reached 0.01 nJ per instruction in 2008 and 0.0026 nJ per instruction in 2006, not below 0.05 pJ.⁵
Also, I should have mentioned the GreenArrays chips, which are actually fast; they're not mainstream not because they're slow but because you can't program them in C. Each core has 64 words of RAM and no PROM, so the only practical way to program them is in Forth. But they use 8 pJ per instruction, i.e. 0.008 nJ.
¹ TI's 2012 whitepaper http://www.ti.com/general/docs/lit/getliterature.tsp?baseLit... http://www.ti.com/lit/wp/slay015/slay015.pdf claims the MSP430F2001 can run a million instructions per second on 300 microamps on a 3-volt power supply, which works out to 900 μW, or 900 pJ/insn. GreenArrays published a whitepaper http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/WP003-100... comparing an MSP430F5xx at 8MHz to a GreenArrays chip; they claim that TI publication SLAS655A claims that the MSP430 uses 330 pJ per instruction or 2310 pJ per 16×16-bit multiply, while the GreenArrays core consumed 8 pJ per instruction or 450 pJ per 16×16 multiply.
² http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/2006/08/explodin... (WABAC machine link: http://web.archive.org/web/20161228045915/www.newscientist.c...) says that the Pentium from 1993, Pentium Ms from 2003, and Core Duos from 2006 all use 10 to 13 nanojoules per 32-bit instruction.
³ According to the ST datasheet for the STM32L011x3 and STM32L011x4 (DocID027973 Rev 5), these chips typically use 1.95 mA at 16MHz on range 2 (Vcore = 1.5 V, VOS[1:0] = 10) on the HSI16 clock source with Dhrystone-equivalent data processing code executed from RAM, Flash switched OFF, in Run mode (Table 24 on p.55 in §6.3.4, "Supply Current Characteristics"), and they claim 0.95 Dhrystone MIPS per MHz on the front page. This is with Vdd = 3.0 V (according to p. 52) but the extra 1.5 V is just burned in a linear voltage regulator, so the current consumption should be almost exactly the same anywhere in the operational range from 1.65 V to 3.6 V. If we assume 1.8 V, which is probably close to the lowest safe voltage, we get 1.8V · 1.95 mA = 3.51 mW. Dividing this by 0.95 · 16 MHz, we get 231 pJ per instruction; presumably in real life the number would vary anywhere from 200 to 1000. Both higher and lower clock speeds use more energy per instruction, as does running from Flash.
⁴ The LPC1110 datasheet http://www.nxp.com/documents/data_sheet/LPC111X.pdf claims it can run at 48 MHz at 1.8 V and just under 8 mA, which works out to 300 pJ per instruction. It's probably using an earlier version of the same IP core in the ST chip.
⁵ http://www-mtl.mit.edu/researchgroups/icsystems/pubs/confere... is A 10-pJ/instruction, 4-MIPS Micropower DSP for Sensor Applications, Ickes et al., MIT, 2008; http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~taustin/papers/VLSI06-sublim.pdf is A 2.60pJ/Inst Subthreshold Sensor Processor for Optimal Energy Efficiency, Zhai et. al., poster, 2006. I'm not totally clear on whether these processors were actually fabricated or not.
Edit: fixed the link
here's a link to the one you're talking about: https://www.freegeekvancouver.org/
edit: adding the link to the fantastic portland version, now that op has fixed their link: https://www.freegeek.org/
Solder joints get smaller and closer every year, leaving whiskers more and more likely to eventually short out two adjacent pins. Not to mention the cheap failure prone board level components found everywhere. (Yay for esploding capacitors).
And that's before you even get to all the junk embedded devices that have little in the way of standardization or documentation, etc. That hardware will likely never run software the OEM didn't ship.
Apparently, the refresh rate for cloud data centers is now getting down to 2 years or less. Easier to expand by replacing instead of leasing new space. This, combined with how environmentally conscious the big cloud companies are, has led to a big demand in IT Asset Disposal services. Also obviously there are security aspects in play here.
In PW Singer’s novel about war with China, pretty sure this was a big plot point when imports of microchips stopped and regular citizens had to donate their iPads and what not to be stripped of valuable material.
Why Texas? Are there lots of data centres there? If so, is that an energy cost thing, because it seems a place with greater cooling requirements?
Lots of DCs and general IT work available there. Austin is a burgeoning tech city.
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/news/2015/07/10/data-centers...
* Regarding Daisy, I'd be curious to hear how it handles damaged iPhones. Can it and to what degree? What percentage of iPhones can be recycled by it? I fear that any iPhone that's compromised won't be recycled out of concern for breaking the recycling machine.
http://peterburk.github.io/blog/#iBookRepair
Then I went off to university and studied Electronic Systems Engineering. But for the last 7 years, I've had work experience in software. I still regularly fix computers for friends.
If there are tech recycling companies in NZ/Australia/Canada that are hiring, I'd be so excited to do this full-time. If I got another job in Vancouver, I'd volunteer with FreeGeek, just because I enjoy it so much. I wish I could get paid to do my hobby though.
What should I focus on to get more hands-on the hardware part?
You can make a reasonably good living in Shenzhen by reselling expensive chips from discarded hardware.
Not just because it's the absence of business that is good for the planet (absolutely speaking), but also because it being a business just means to encourage more e-waste (for it to be mined). Plus all the externalities.
It's just another case of "we screw the planet badly, but we put some plastics in special recycling bins, so that's ok".
I don’t know where else to dispose them, it’s not like I could leave one in my trash bin. Metal bin?
In Copenhagen (this probably varies across Denmark) I have a small electronics bin in the apartment building basement, with all the other bins. Officially, I think its to be used for anything that fits, with larger things taken somewhere else.
When I dispose of my desktop PC, I will take 5 minutes to unscrew the motherboard, drives, PSU etc and put them in the electronics bin. The case will go in the metal bin.
When I dispose of old elections at work, the whole lot goes in the large waste electronics container.
(1) https://sweden.se/nature/the-swedish-recycling-revolution/
[0] - https://hackaday.com/2013/11/18/salvaging-gold-from-old-elec...